-Hindustan Times In this epic drought year in India, water is scarce, but not opinions. From newsprint to TV studios, perhaps more words have been either written or spoken than the total rainfall in Latur till now. Oddly enough, while one part of the nation had been reeling from water stress and Agrarian crises for decades, the other part has willfully chosen to ignore it. So what led to this sudden...

-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...

-Down to Earth Blog MGNREGA has been successful in Madhya Pradesh. Can the scheme also provide solutions for the current drought in the region? Sevanti Bai (45) lives alone in a village in Madhya Pradesh. Her husband died fifteen years ago, owing to health complications. With no land or children to depend on, she fends for herself by engaging in ‘rojgaar guarantee, as the locals call the scheme. MGNREGA, she says, has...

-Hindustan Times About 330 million people are affected by drought in 10 states as 256 districts reel from severe water shortages and poor farmers suffer crop losses. The current dry spell is partly because of two back-to-back years of bad monsoons. Policy makers have no control over fickle weather whims. As credit rating and research agency Crisil points out, the rising frequency of weather shocks amid higher vulnerabilities has compounded Agrarian...

-TheWire.in The number of jobs created in eight select industries in 2015 was 135,000. This was much worse than the 421,000 jobs created in 2014 and the 419,000 in 2013. Here, when I use the shorthand “jobs” it means both jobs and livelihoods for self-employed people. In the farm sector, most “jobs” are livelihoods. In the non-farm sector too, outside of the organized sector, much of working opportunities come as self-employed livelihoods...