-The Telegraph Below-normal and drought are the new normal. Since 2012 there has only been one normal monsoon. Monsoons follow their own patterns, unpredictable as they may be. In the past, certain periods, spanning a decade or sometimes two, have had higher frequencies of droughts and at the moment, we seem to be stuck in such a cycle. Between 1900 and the year 2000, there was one drought per decade. But...

-Newsclick.in With the union government now giving a huge push to the use of solar pumps for extracting groundwater for irrigation, the problem of depletion gets further compounded. Buldhana (Maharashtra): As a large part of India reels under floods this monsoon, there MIGht seem little reason to dwell on groundwater depletion. Yet, government policy MIGht be putting the already over-used groundwater at greater risk. In 2012, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural...

-Economic and Political Weekly The need for the public distribution system varies widely across states and districts. In some districts, the poor draw more than 80% of their grain from thePDS, but in other districts this share is less than 10%. A wide diversity of relationships with the PDS exist, suggesting a need for alternative modes of provisioning. A variable geometry of food provisioning MIGht emerge, with cash working better for...

-The Indian Express Senior BJP leader Nirmal Singh told The Sunday Express that they want a safeguard like a “domicile” certificate, so as to “protect the interests of locals in respect to land and state jobs”. Jammu: Less than a week after the abrogation of Article 370 by the Union government, and scrapping of Article 35A which extended special privileges to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, the local BJP wants...

-Livemint.com * An exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming book on the Assam Accord takes a critical look at the NRC crisis * The passage analyses the pros and cons of the debate over a work-permit formula to deal with the situation. One of the foremost thinkers to academically elaborate on the formula (of work permits in Assam) was author–journalist–rights activist Sanjoy Hazarika in Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and...