-The Indian Express Drought for 2nd straight year leaves tribals of Attapaddy at lenders’ mercy, hits pregnant women’s health Attappady: At the sun-baked village of Nallasinka in Attappady, a frail woman is desperately scanning a pipeline that takes water to a private estate, looking for a leak that was once there. “It is five days since water reached our colony. Last week, we survived by collecting water that leaked out of this...

-VillageSquare.in The constant swing in the prices of tur dal in Telangana from one year to the next and tardy implementation of the government’s procurement mechanism have made life tough for thousands of subsistence farmers in Kodangal and Husnabad Husnabad and Kodangal are just 110 km from the cyber city of Hyderabad. In the last week of March, it was a beginning of a long dry spell, with temperatures hovering around the...

-TheWire.in The insurance coverage in 2015 was 22.3%, with a government expenditure of Rs 2,955 crore. But by spending 4.5x since, how does the government admit to a coverage of only 23%? Farmer suicides and agrarian distress have likely never been among the national public debates as they are right now. A group of Tamil Nadu farmers, whose protests in New Delhi were dubbed ‘bizarre’ but who were actually desperate for debate and...

-Scroll.in Suranga is a horizontal tunnel-like well excavated in a hillside. Even as Kerala reels under severe drought, Gangadhar Rao never misses a day to irrigate thousands of areca nut trees, coconut trees and pepper plants on his 30 acres of farmland. Rao is a farmer from Bedadka Panchayath in Kerala’s northernmost district of Kasaragod and depends on Suranga for all his water needs — irrigation and domestic — round the year. Suranga is...

-The Hindu Business Line Kutch presents an example of robust desert horticulture Over the past decade, the total horticultural land under cultivation of fruits such as pomegranate, mango and date palm has doubled in Kutch and its fruit production has trebled. And why is this a surprise? Because this semi-arid region in Kutch has, through 10 years of toil, transformed the landscape and set an innovative example in desert horticulture. Adversity, they say, can...