-The Hindu Business Line Low ground water levels have led to sluggish start to sowing of most kharif crops Pay Commission payouts may be a welcome shower of salary, but monsoon showers matter most for the economy. Why so? The proportion of the country’s working population dependent on agriculture was at 38 per cent in 2011-12 — and this, even as the share of agriculture in the Indian economy stood at a modest 15...

-BBC Up to one third of the world's food is wasted before it can be eaten. That's 1.3 billion tonnes, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. At the same time up to 793 million people don't get enough nourishment to help them live a healthy life. So, what can be done to fix these two major challenges the world is facing? In India, dabbawalas are using their world-renowned...

-The Hindu ‘Groundwater will not be a free resource’   New Delhi: The government has for the first time said that citizens had a right to safe water and laid out stringent rules on how corporations and large entities can extract groundwater in two separate pieces of draft legislation uploaded on the website of the Union Water Ministry and open for public comment. The Bills —in a first — also propose fines ranging from...

Situation alarming: More than one-third population hit by drought   The country is facing severe drought for the second consecutive year. Conservative estimates from official sources show that over a quarter of rural habitations are facing drinking water scarcity. Although both India Meteorological Department and Skymet have predicted a more than normal rainfall during June-September, 2016, the water storage available in 91 major reservoirs of the country has declined from 22 percent...

-Hindustan Times With progressively increasing severity of rising temperatures and rain deficits over two consecutive years – 2014 and 2015, the Great Indian Drought was always coming. The India Meteorological Department, ministry of home affairs, the ministry of water resources, the Ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare office, and the National Disaster Management Authority knew it. The question is, what did we do with this knowledge? Six hundred million of India’s 1.2 billion...