-Livemint.com Solar-powered water pumps will insure farmers when rains fail and also replace polluting diesel ones New Delhi: India has set an ambitious target of achieving 100,000 megawatts of solar power capacity by 2022 as well as doubling farm incomes by the 75th year of Independence. Both these targets can be a game changer for rural India if implemented in unison, suggests new research. According to a recent study by New Delhi-based International...

-The Financial Express For India, a looming freshwater crisis—the World Bank already puts the country’s per capita renewable freshwater resources at less than a fifth of the world, far behind the other four in the list of top-five populous countries—is set to become a nightmare. A study published in Nature Geoscience has found that, upto a depth of 200 metres, 60% of the groundwater in the Indian part of the Indo-Gangetic...

-The Indian Express India should learn from China and start with liberalisation of rural land, labour and capital markets before attempting bigger things. Independence Day has come and gone with its usual mix of celebrations, pride and ruminations on how things could be better. Interestingly, several media commentaries tagged the event with the 25th anniversary of economic reforms, launched in 1991 around the same time of the year. They largely dwelt on the theme...

-The Hindu The acceleration will leave the RBI less space to cut rates Wholesale price inflation accelerated to a 23-month high of 3.6 per cent in July, driven mainly by higher food prices, according to official data.The pace of price gains as measured by the wholesale price index more than doubled in July from 1.62 per cent in June, leaving the Reserve Bank of India even less elbow room to cut benchmark...

-Bloomberg When farmers in the scorched village of Horti in Western India were struggling to raise money for a canal, they turned to an unlikely source: a crowdfunding website called FuelADream. The farmers had never heard of crowdfunding before, but a local non-profit group suggested the site and helped them write a proposal that explained how a canal would help feed local families. Within weeks, they had raised Rs 300,000 ($4,490) from...