-Livemint.com A government report says nearly 11,500 of Maharashtra’s 40,000 villages face water scarcity due to a combination of less than normal rainfall and consequent exploitation of groundwater Mumbai: The Maharashtra government on Tuesday declared a ‘drought-like situation’ in 180 tehsils , more than half the 353 of these administrative units in the state, in an acknowledgement of looming agrarian distress. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said after a cabinet meeting that his government...

-The Hindu Despite the dense forest cover in the Western Ghats, Kerala had only about 19% resilience while Sikkim had 100%. Chennai: The increasing variations in rainfall, frequent drought and heat waves along with changes in evapotranspiration tend to alter the hydrological balance. This is turn affects the ecosystem productivity. A study was therefore carried out in India to assess the resilience of terrestrial ecosystem to drought at the district and State...

-Livemint.com While wealth has been rising in India, not everyone has shared in this growth. There is still considerable wealth poverty, says Credit Suisse’s India wealth report The richest 10% of Indians own 77.4% of the country’s wealth, says Credit Suisse in their 2018 Global Wealth Report. The bottom 60%, the majority of the population, own 4.7%. The richest 1% own 51.5% (chart 1 above). And it’s not some bleeding-heart NGO that’s...

-TheWire.in Most of the ‘reforms’ that are being introduced to address poor delivery of social services are silent on the issue of inadequate human resources, among other shortfalls in capacity. The poor performance of the public sector especially in education, health and other social services has been the subject of a lot of debates in the last few decades. The dominant narrative has attributed implementation failures to corruption, lack of accountability, poor...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A Team of 40 IIT Delhi students has devised a way to fight air pollution - by replacing wood with cow dung "logs" during funerals. The "environment-friendly technique" also seeks to reduce deforestation by cutting down dependence on wood. "Arth, an initiative by Enactus IIT-D, targets replacing wood as a fuel at Delhi's crematoriums," said Faraz Mazhar, a member of the group. According to his Teammate, Shalaka...