After failing to come anywhere near the 10th Five Year Plan (2002-07) target of 4 per cent per annum rate of growth of agricultural output, the Planning Commission has projected a lower target growth rate of 3 to 3.5 per cent per annum for the 11th Plan period. While some may view this as a more modest target, others may consider it as still far too ambitious, given the track...

Amipur may be a small dot along the national highway from Patna to Nawada, but its ambitions are big. In the 50-odd households in the village, sparsely populated and rife with an uneasy quiet, most men have left for work outside Bihar. Siyaram Chauhan is the one who returned. He was rescued last month by the state government officials from a brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich where he worked as...

THE fast-depleting groundwater levels and subsidised electricity supply to farmers in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh spell doom for agricultural productivity in the region regarded as the “Food Bowl of India”, and has prompted the government to turn its gaze towards the eastern region for fulfilling its food security ambitions. A background note drafted by the department of agriculture and cooperation (DoAC) for the two-daylong workshop on the theme...

A leading Dutch environment agency reported on Monday that the seminal 2007 UN scientific report on climate change is too generalized and has even more errors than discovered so far -- including one contributed by the agency itself. But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed the errors had no effect on the fundamental conclusion by UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is...

The steady progress of the monsoons ought to refocus policy attention on India's deeply stressed water economy . There are fast rising demands on water resources generally, together with poorly governed supply systems, with the result that overall balances are precarious. What is worse, there's increasingly reckless mining of groundwater, and aquifer depletion is concentrated in many of the most populated and economically significant areas. Now, we have a highly...