-The New Indian Express Something remarkable happened when the farmers came marching to Mumbai recently. Instead of greeting them with hostility, Mumbaikars welcomed them with affection, food and water. This change in attitude was triggered by the farmers’ extraordinary discipline and their efforts to ensure minimal disruption to the Mumbaikars’ routines. Even hard-boiled journalists acknowledged, for a brief moment, urbanites had realised  our farmers and adivasis were indeed facing difficult times. The...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-Livemint.com Farmers continue to be vulnerable to frequent episodes of losses that neither the state nor the markets have been able to mitigate The dramatic long march to Mumbai involving thousands of distressed farmers on 12 March is a remarkable feat of peaceful protest against the state, given its apathy towards farmers’ distress as well as its failures in safeguarding tribal land rights. However, what is surprisingly missing in this poignant narrative...

-The Financial Express The scheme, part-funded by the World Bank, aims at pushing recharge of groundwater sources and efficient use at the local level. Rapidly-depleting groundwater in nearly a third of the blocks that were assessed in a study by the Central Ground Water Board (CWGB) has caused, The Times of India reports, the Centre to put the Rs 6,000-crore Atal Bhujal Yojana on fast-track. The scheme, part-funded by the World Bank,...

-Hindustan Times The Atal Bhujal Yojana will be launched in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh The government has finalised the contours of a Rs 6,000-crore scheme to tackle the country’s depleting Groundwater level, almost a year-and-a-half after finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the plan in the Union Budget. Called the Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABY) and piloted by the Union water resources ministry, the scheme now needs the cabinet’s...