-Hindustan Times A migrant labourer not long ago, 37-year-old Sitaram Majhi is now a successful farmer. As Odisha’s agricultural fields starve for water due to drought conditions this year, Majhi never had a problem watering his crop in Kharamal village in Bargarh district’s parched Paikmal block, more than 500 km from Bhubaneswar. Equipped with chahala – a small Traditional water harvesting structure – and a vermi-compost pit the three-acre farm, on which he...

-The Indian Express The central message of Angus Deaton’s work: Becoming richer is not necessarily the same thing as becoming better-off. In the preface to his magisterial 2013 book The Great Escape, Angus Deaton thanks his teachers. “Richard Stone was perhaps my most profound influence,” Deaton writes, “from him I learned about measurement — how little we can say without it and how important it is to get it right.” Important, indeed....

-The Hindu Business Line Rejuvenated, clean and hygienic, they are a sustainable alternative to tube wells As 35-year-old Dharma Devi lowers her bucket into the ancient, stone well to draw drinking water for her family, she grumbles about the quality of the water body. “This one is closest to our fields, so we have to use it. But look at the overgrowth of plants around it and the filth that can fall...

-The Indian Express A number of significant disclosures were forced by the RTI, including the information regarding 2G and Commonwealth Games and so on. The Right to Information Act is now 10 years old — long enough to give us a fair idea of how it has performed on the ground. Riding on a huge wave of civil society activism, it started on a positive note and made unexpected impact early...

-Outlook Scientist and longtime activist against genetically modified BT seeds, Dr. Vandana Shiva, talks about why BT has a devastating fallout. A sudden pest attack has ruined cotton crops in large parts of Punjab, bringing biotech, or BT Cotton back into focus. Farmers who used bio-fertilisers in the Malwa region of the state are said to be safe from this latest pestilence. But those growing BT cotton have lost everything. There...