-Livemint.com The money came from the Centre, which in April revised the amount farmers get as relief for crop damage New Delhi: Two weeks before 2015 ended, 50-year-old Sukhrani received a new year’s gift from the Uttar Pradesh government. The local revenue officer visited her village in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh to hand out cheques to families whose winter crop was damaged due to unseasonal rains between February and April...

Often considered to be a rain-abundant region, the North East has been receiving lesser rainfall during the South West monsoon in the recent years as compared to the 1980s and 1990s. This has been revealed in a study entitled Unprecedented drought in North East India compared to Western India done by Bikash Ranjan Parida and Bakimchandra Oinam (see the link below). Appearing in the December issue of prestigious peer-reviewed scientific...

-Economic and Political Weekly Why has pulse production stagnated despite measures to boost production being well known? This season, the prices of pulses (dals) have been on fire. According to the Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs, Government of India, the average retail price of red gram (tuar) doubled from around Rs 80 a kg in March 2015 to Rs 150–Rs 160 a kg in November 2015. What could...

-Business Standard Unless irrigation expands, agriculture will not be drought-proof Even as India celebrates the golden jubilee of the Green Revolution, the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has come out with data indicating that nearly 70 per cent of farmers subsist on economically unviable farm holdings of less than a hectare in size. Over one-fifth of farm households report salaried employment, and not farming, as the prime source of their income. Around...

-The Hindu 2015’s El Niño on course to being the strongest ever. The highest daily rainfall in a century. Freak weather conditions on one day. The hottest-ever Indian Ocean. The strongest-ever El Niño. The hottest year on record. The bad news is that a perfect storm of meteorological conditions combined to create Chennai’s worst-ever deluge last week, exacerbated in no small part by civic infrastructure pushed to its limit and systemic dysfunction. The...