-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...

-Hindustan Times India’s groundwater recharge is not adequate even though drought conditions are making us extract more and more of the resource, and that the people are wasting too much water. In a report released recently, the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, the University of California, and the India Meteorological Department, Pune, said nearly 50% of the country is currently facing drought with at least 16% falling in the exceptional or...

-Firstpost.com Sangrur (Punjab): It is difficult to imagine Jasmine Khan’s pain and agony at losing her 14-month-old son in 2016. Living in a two-room concrete house in a labyrinth of bylanes in Handiaya village of Barnala district in Sangrur Lok Sabha constituency, she wells up every time Bilal intrudes on her thoughts, no matter that it has been two years since he succumbed to blood cancer. She often tries to hide...

-The Hindu Business Line Working from a mud house in a remote Maharashtra village, Rahibai Popere is taking farming back to its roots Pune: Twenty years ago, when her grandson fell ill, Rahibai Popere was convinced vegetables and foodgrains containing ‘poison’ had made the child unhealthy. She asked her son to stop buying vegetables and foodgrains grown using hybrid seeds, chemicals and fertilisers. And then started a journey to conserve and save indigenous...

-The Indian Express The march is set to end on February 27 at the state Legislative Assembly in Mumbai, when the Budget Session would be in progress. Nashik: Tribals, landless agriculturalists and small farmers converged in Nashik on Wednesday for their second “long march” to Mumbai since March last year. In small contingents, they arrived from places like Peint, Trimbakeshwar, Kalwan, Palghar and adjoining areas, getting off their dust-covered vehicles 8 to...