-The Times of India Ahmedabad: Salt pan workers, fishing community and maldharis in the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK) should be given their respective rights - salt making, fishing and pastoral land grazing. When denied these rights, locals illegally make salt and graze cattle in the forest area, leading to hassles with the forest department, a study commissioned by the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) has found. During the 2012...

-Business Today The elixir of life has been the subject of a dispute of life-threatening proportions between industry and communities. When a life sustaining resource is in short supply, conflicting claims over it are bound to arise. Water conflicts span the gamut of fights, from neighbours in water starved colonies to those between states over river waters. But perhaps the most vital current conflict over water is that between agriculture and industry.   "Around...

-TheWire.in According to the central government’s statement to the Supreme Court last week, a third of the India’s districts are currently facing a severe drought. This means that at least 33 crore Indians are affected by ongoing the crisis. Expressing their deep concern on the issue and the impact it is having on rural populations of the country, and asking that the government take appropriate relief measures immediately, more than 150 academics...

-The Hindu Prem Singh’s farm has plenty of water, fruit-bearing trees, and organic products BANDA (U.P.): In the parched, brown landscape of Uttar Pradesh’s Bundelkhand region, where hundreds of distressed farmers have taken their lives in the past few decades or have been forced to migrate, Prem Singh’s farm is an exception. In the fabulous green farm, there is plenty for everyone: abundance of water-bodies for animals to drink from, many fruit-bearing trees,...

-FirstPost.com This Firstpost series that began with highlighting how private water sellers are doing sound business in the midst of severe economic downturn in the water-parched region; the toothless laws, lack of enforcement and ineffective irrigation network which has led to the exploitation and depletion of water levels in the dams; crop failures triggering farmer suicides; the region’s sugarcane addiction, and climate change manipulations affecting the agricultural produce, provides a vantage...