The ambitious Polavaram project, the multi-purpose project proposed across the Godavari for making optimum utilisation of water going waste into the sea, is mired in problems. The much-talked about project, aimed at stabilising the century-old Krishna delta and irrigating over 7 lakh acres in the upland areas of East and West Godavari districts, is dogged by uncertainty since it became a bone of contention between different regions and faced with litigation....

The poster boy of microfinance is now seeking some anonymity. In Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of the worst crisis faced by microfinance in India, SKS Microfinance is playing down its identity and going into preservation mode. At its modest office in a residential colony in Warangal district, India’s largest microfinance company has taken down its board. At its head office in upmarket Begumpet in Hyderabad, it hung a cloth mesh...

The prospects of a bumper foodgrain yield during the monsoon have considerably dimmed as the threat of cyclone looms large and heavy rains continue to batter several coastal districts. Standing crop spread over an estimated 2.83 lakh hectares (a little over 7 lakh acres), according to preliminary estimates, is under water in six coastal districts. The extent could be much higher after the assessment of the damage is complete. A cyclonic...

To avoid graft in the implementation of the Nat-ional Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), e-muster olls will be launched for job seekers in the state from November 1. The implementation of NREGS has been facing a lot of criticism of graft ever since it was introduced a few years ago. In order to arrest such graft, the NREGS implementing agency, the district water management agency, is creating a database of...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...