-The Hindu Ramaswamy R. Iyer, a water policy expert who wrote extensively for The Hindu, saw rivers as inextricable parts of the lives of communities. Ramaswamy R. Iyer passed away on September 9 in Delhi after a severe bout of viral fever. The water policy expert, who last held the position of an honorary research professor at the Centre for Policy Research, earlier served as Secretary of Water Resources in the Central...

-Economic and Political Weekly The draft National Health Policy 2015 is an improvement over its predecessors--the policies of 1984 and 2002. However, it also reveals several gaps, inconsistencies and blind spots which tend to dilute otherwise constructive proposals. The purpose of this article is to open up the draft to further public debate and comment. Forum for Medical Ethics Society (fmesmumbai@gmail.com) is a voluntary, non-profit organisation registered in Mumbai. The society was...

-The Statesman It's the same story every year. Heavy rains, huge volume of water spilling over the water channels and mismanagement of rivers in spate, leading to heavy floods inundating large parts of India. This year too the story is no different. Even as this article goes to print, Assam, West Bengal, Manipur, Odisha, Gujarat and Rajasthan almost a third of India is either facing floods or coping with a trail...

-The Indian Express We can add millions of hectares to irrigated land without building a single new dam. We just need to adopt a different method of managing the water already stored in them. One of the drivers of India’s irrigation sector has been the construction of large dams on our rivers, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously described as “the temples of modern India”. While these dams have helped increase India’s irrigated...

-The Hindu The battle over the Narmada dam reflects a journey, a pilgrimage, and a recollection of 30 years of resistance. Numbers alone cannot make sense of it because it demands a different kind of storytelling If you were to ask a middle class person today what the most significant act of history in the India of the last 20 years is, most would say this — the rise of Narendra Modi....