-The Indian Express The last two years have seen some progress in expediting completion of unfinished major and minor canal projects. Pune: Sustained efforts over the last two years to improve irrigation access for farmers in India seem to have begun showing results, at least in terms of creation of physical infrastructure. The Narendra Modi government had, in 2016, embarked on a mission to complete all unfinished major and medium irrigation projects – some...

-Livemint.com The National Forest Policy will be an overarching policy for forest management, with the aim of bringing a minimum of one-third of India’s total geographical area under forest or tree cover New Delhi: India’s environment ministry has unveiled a draft of the new National Forest Policy (NFP) that proposes to restrict “schemes and projects which interfere with forests that cover steep slopes, catchments of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, geologically unstable terrain...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between states. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The safety and operational performance of 700 large dams across 18 states will be improved through repair and rehabilitation work over six years (2020-26) at an estimated cost of nearly Rs 7,000 crore. Some of these dams will also be developed as tourist destinations so that it can generate revenue for maintenance and create jobs for local people. The World Bank-funded project was cleared by...

-TheWire.in While the government claims it “will bring healthcare system closer to the homes of people,” it hopes to do this through the private sector, not by strengthening the public health system. Health is being hailed as the biggest winner of Budget 2018, but a cursory look at the numbers shows that there is nothing to celebrate as far as the health budget is concerned. In fact, the Budget this year once...