-Livemint.com The efforts of the government in revamping the crop insurance and land titling schemes are long-term solutions which will take time to bear results The agricultural sector is facing its worst moment in the last three decades. The last time India saw such distress caused by back-to-back deficient rains was during the drought of 1986-87 and 1987-88. The severity of the situation is evident from the stories of migration and...

-CNN-IBN Unable to bear the famine at least 18 lakh people have migrated out of Bundelkhand to Delhi alone during the past one year, sale of train tickets from the region suggest. Figures available from ten major railway stations in drought-hit Bundelkhand showed, that between April 2015 and March 2016, nearly 18 lakh people -- which is about 10% of the population -- bought tickets for unreserved compartments in trains going to...

-The Indian Express There is a mounting employment crisis in India. The current growth model, built on large private investments, cannot address the problem. Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan raised many hackles with his demand for affirmative action or job reservations for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates in the private sector. He suggested that “providing quota in private jobs will help cool down anger among SC and STs”, thereby stemming...

-The Indian Express The MGNREGA was inspired by the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Act, passed in 1977, wherein policymakers found wage employment as the best way to empower people against drought As India faces the onslaught of another severe drought, and water, food, and employment dry up, the government will claim that it is doing its best to cope with the adversity. But, given the facts, that will be a patently false...

-Business Standard Back-to-back droughts and record-low farm commodity prices have forced the NDA government to look at MGNREGS in a new light.Things have started to look up for the scheme About a year back, Raqibul Hussain, Assam's rural development minister, was unhappy because he could not stop the Central government from lowering the state's annual entitlement under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for 2014-15. This, he said in a day-long...