-Down to Earth In the 1990s, non-profits and farmers themselves built check dams; today, the government does it, without proper research or site selection Fifty-four-year old Dineshbhai Babariya has just harvested a 20 quintal cotton crop, his second harvest in the last one year in his four bigha (1.6 acre) farm in the Jasapar village of Gujarat’s Saurashtra region. August 2018 was the last time the village in Rajkot district received around 228...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Three summers ago, a water train dispatched by the Centre had chugged into Uttar Pradesh' Bundelkhand region, attempting to provide succour to the parched area. The train had pulled in empty, drawn water from a local reservoir and triggered a massive political row between the Centre and the state government, as a result. This year, the weatherman's predictions for Bundelkhand are bleak as usual, not ruling...

-Mongabay.com * Uttarakhand has vast water resources and is a lifeline for millions of people living in downstream areas. However, many areas in the state are facing a water shortage. * The hill state is going to polls in the first phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on April 11. In some constituencies, voters, dissatisfied with authorities for failing to provide water facilities, aim to register their protests, by boycotting the...

-VillageSquare.in The residents of Rampura, a small village in the buffer zone of the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, have been asked to move. But, they say, with no allocation of alternative land, where will they go? “If they come to destroy our houses with elephants, we’ll throw all our belongings and our children into the Pond, form a circle and ask them to shoot us, but we will not leave...

-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...