-Livemint.com Erratic monsoon rains and skewed farm incentives have led to the growing Groundwater crisis, impacting farm incomes and availability of drinking water India’s monsoon provides relief from oppressive heat but, more importantly, it provides sustenance for millions. A timely and sufficient monsoon is a critical input for farmers but increasingly, because of climate change, the monsoon is becoming less reliable. Exacerbating this is a set of policies which encourage water wastage,...

-National Herald Agriculture, food and trade policy expert Devinder Sharma writes: “My understanding is that only agriculture can reboot the economy, sustain millions of livelihoods, and reduce global warming.” At a time when Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says that neo-liberalism is ‘dead and buried’, and the world as a result is increasingly grappling with the gigantic problems of rising unemployment, gnawing inequality and climatic change reaching a tripping point, agriculture alone has...

-The Hindu With growing environmental distress, policymakers cannot shy away from adopting best eco-management practices In a report last year, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) called the Chennai floods of 2015 a “man made disaster”, a pointer to how the encroachment of lakes and river floodplains has driven India’s sixth largest city to this ineluctable situation. The Chennai floods are a symbol of consistent human failings and poor urban...

-The Indian Express Jalyukta Shivar is the flagship programme of the Maharashtra government launched in December 2014. It aims to make 5,000 villages free of water scarcity. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his latest Mann ki Baat, emphasised on the need for dedicated efforts towards water conservation and launched ‘Jal Shakti, Jan Shakti’. Maharashtra has experienced drought four times in the last five years and the scarcity of water is set...

-The Indian Express The FM has rightly spoken of a “focus on integrated demand and supply side management of water at the local level, including source sustainability and management of household wastewater for reuse in agriculture”. India is not a water-short country. We have merely managed our plentiful water very poorly. What we need, therefore, is a paradigm shift in policy. Could the finance minister (FM) be said to have risen to...