-World Resources Institute India struggles with water scarcity, a problem that poses especially huge implications for the country's food security and rural livelihoods. The country has long-battled its scarcity issues through Watershed Development, a participatory approach to improve water management through afforestation and reforestation, sustainable land management, soil and water conservation, water-harvesting infrastructure, and social interventions. But while watershed development has been employed in communities throughout India, its potential long-term costs...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A fact-finding team of intellectuals from JNU and Delhi University (DU), hit out at the Samajwadi Party government in UP, alleging it has outsourced relief work for Muzaffarnagar riot victims to Muslim communal organizations like the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind. After several visits to riot-ravaged Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, the team comprising Dr Mohan Rao and oncologist Dr Vikas Bajpai, and Hindu College professor Ish Mishra released its...

-The Times of India Gujarat's much-touted Chiranjeevi Yojana, launched in 2006 to reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in BPL households, has not had any significant impact, says a new study by Duke University. The programme, which subsidizes the cost of delivery at designated private sector hospitals, has not led to increased probability of institutional child-delivery. Also, analyses of household expenditure of women who used the subsidized delivery scheme in private hospitals...

-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...

-The Hindu In this interview with The Hindu, AAP leader Yogendra Yadav says that in his dream script, his party will be the natural political hope for the transformative energies he sees in public life Well-known psephologist, social scientist and former university lecturer in political science, Yogendra Yadav, 50, surprised everyone when he joined the Aam Aadmi Party. In an exclusive interview with The Hindu, he spoke about AAP's plans for Lok...