-The Times of India Yet another deluge, coming close on the heels of the wettest November Chennai has seen in over a century, is something the city just could not cope with. Heavy rains on November 16 had exposed the appalling state of the civic infrastructure that was totally unprepared to handle the floods. Clogged and overflowing drains, inundated housing colonies, rotting garbage, electrocutions and roads caving in at many places...

Agricultural insurance is supposed to protect farmers from financial hardships and risks when crop losses and damage takes place due to extreme weather events such as drought, cyclone, hailstorms, flood etc. However, in reality this does not hold true in India. Due to the failure of crop insurance schemes in India, there has been a deepening of agrarian crisis and rural distress in the recent times, particularly in the backdrop of...

As Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh fight the fury of flood caused by annual northeast monsoon, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the natural disaster in Uttarakhand, which took place in June 2013, has been made available in the public domain recently. The CAG report discloses how various development activities in the state flouted guidelines issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Expert Committee on glaciers...

-The Financial Express The plan to build a buffer stock of pulses, akin to such facilities for rice and wheat, has run into a hurdle after the agriculture ministry insisted that only lentils that meet the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. The plan to build a buffer stock of pulses, akin to such facilities for rice and wheat, has run into a hurdle after the agriculture ministry insisted that only...

-The Hindu But an Assocham study has warned of an increase in prices Amid concern that the price of rice may be next to shoot up after those of pulses and onion, trade bodies put forth divergent views. V.S. Sethia, former president and currently a governing council member of the All-India Rice Export Association, told The Hindu that apprehensions of a sharp rise in rice price were baseless as ample stock of regular...