Agricultural insurance is supposed to protect farmers from financial hardships and risks when crop losses and damage takes place due to extreme weather events such as drought, cyclone, hailstorms, flood etc. However, in reality this does not hold true in India. Due to the failure of crop insurance schemes in India, there has been a deepening of agrarian crisis and rural distress in the recent times, particularly in the backdrop of...

-The Hindu India’s strategy at the Paris Climate Change summit will be to work with emerging economies and press the developed world to concede that responsibility for cutting carbon emissions after 2020 cannot be shared equally by rich and poor nations. Two major issues that New Delhi will focus on at the Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are failed ambitions on transferring low...

As Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh fight the fury of flood caused by annual northeast monsoon, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the natural disaster in Uttarakhand, which took place in June 2013, has been made available in the public domain recently. The CAG report discloses how various development activities in the state flouted guidelines issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Expert Committee on glaciers...

-The Times of India AHMEDABAD: Gujarat is prone to drought once in three years while states like Rajasthan, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka tend to have two years of drought in a period of five years. This is one of the conclusions of the central government's report, 'Drought, Crisis Management Plan-2015' which also says that around 16% of the country and 68% of the sowing area nationally is drought prone. In the...

-The Hindu On Thursday midnight, the Union Environment Ministry submitted its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), committing to cut the emissions intensity of GDP by 33-35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. The INDCs, which lay out the blueprint for tackling climate change, emphasised eight key goals — sustainable lifestyles, cleaner economic development, reducing emission intensity of GDP, increasing the share of...