-The Hindustan Times Former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh set a cat among the pigeons, in his inimitable style, at a recent national conference on climate and sustainable development at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai. He asserted that India would be "the last man standing at Paris", referring to the United Nations climate negotiations which will culminate in France in December 2015. India's current stance was "inflexible...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Planning for a new India -Syeda Hameed
-The Indian Express New body must retain the Commission's mechanisms for Centre-state discussion The prime minister spoke from the ramparts of the Red Fort this morning, putting to rest all speculation about the future of the Planning Commission. I write as a member of 10 years standing of this apex think-tank. The Planning Commission was the brainchild of Jawaharlal Nehru, who created it by cabinet order; it has no legislative sanction. Prime...
More »Maharashtra's irrigation system tied in knots -Aman Sethi
-The Business Standard Agrarian crisis in the state appears as much a failure of planning as the result of a shortage of rain On a dry and cloudless day this month, Balbir Krishna Ingde sat by the Ujjani Dam in the Krishna basin, one of Maharashtra's largest irrigation projects, and confronted the problem of scarcity amid presumed abundance. "The water is filling up the reservoir. If only they could release it into the...
More »Scattered approach to agriculture -Sukhpal Singh and Suman Sahai
-The Hindu Business Line Leaving aside a focus on warehousing and farm credit, the Budget has sprayed ₹100 crore across a clutter of schemes The new government's budget is marked by a fractured approach to the farm sector, where perhaps the most significant spend has been on irrigation, after the large allocation to farm credit. Credit push A sum of ₹1,000 crore sounds good if instead of large irrigation projects and canal networks, the...
More »Tilt the power balance in favour of the poor -Ashwini Kulkarni
-The Hindustan Times Pragati Abhiyan and a member of the National Consortium of CSOs working on MGNREGA India is a vast country and every year either the quantity or the distribution of rainfall is deviant in one part or the other. Moreover, Indian farming is still predominantly rain-fed. In such a scenario, the MGNREGA can do two very important jobs: Drought relief and drought mitigation. Recently, the NDA discussed the MGNREGA in Parliament....
More »