It is mostly caused by deliberate neglect and designed failure of the way we manage water and land It’s drought time again. Nothing new in this announcement. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a Cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable Cycle of nature we must live...

With an eye to mainstreaming sustainability, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has reached out to the United Nations Development Programme to suggest ways for 'greening' rural development schemes and programmes. "We are spending Rs 99,000 crore this year on rural development programmes and it would be a shame if we don't mainstream green objectives in these programmes. Rural development programmes offer a huge opportunity to deal with green concerns and challenges...

The Government of India has formally launched the news Guidelines of the MGNAREGA based on the Mihir Shah Committee report. The news guidelines include many new works under conservation activities and it strengthens the hands of the village panchayats and gram sabhas. However, the list of works does not include the activities under the system of rice intensification (SRI) which encourages scientific method of paddy cultivation with better yield in...

-The Times of India The CBI must prosecute the Pathribal case The Supreme Court's ruling in the Pathribal case, giving military autho-rities eight weeks to court martial the army officials allegedly responsible for the extrajudicial killings of five Kashmiri civilians 12 years ago, is unfortunate. It would be all too easy for the matter to be quietly swept under the carpet if left in the hands of the military authorities, as has...

New census data on asset ownership among different social groups has shown that a far higher proportion of scheduled castes and higher still of scheduled tribes do not own basic consumer durables like a phone or biCycle as compared to "others". Three states however buck this trend; across caste groupings in Punjab, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the rate of ownership of basic consumer durables is high. In fact, the asset ownership...