-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...
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Centre to spend 65% of rural fund to tackle drought, water shortage -Saubhadra Chatterji
-Hindustan Times The NDA government has set an ambitious target of spending 65% of its annual rural development budget by June to tackle drought and unprecedented shortage of water across the country. * Why the high expenditure? As large parts of the country reel under acute water shortage, the government will spend almost 65% of its annual budget by next month to mitigate the crisis. * What does this mean? The firm focus of the...
More »Unseeing the drought -Harsh Mander
-The Indian Express The suffering of millions does not create public outrage, much less government accountability. The people of India’s villages carry collective memories of centuries of calamitous losses of sometimes millions of lives in famines. Famines have been pushed into history, unarguably one of free India’s greatest accomplishments. But the same can’t be said about droughts, which continue to extract an enormous toll on human suffering. At least a third of the...
More »Activists, Academics Write Open Letter to PM Modi on the Drought
-TheWire.in According to the central government’s statement to the Supreme Court last week, a third of the India’s districts are currently facing a severe drought. This means that at least 33 crore Indians are affected by ongoing the crisis. Expressing their deep concern on the issue and the impact it is having on rural populations of the country, and asking that the government take appropriate relief measures immediately, more than 150 academics...
More »Public health’s in the infirmary -Imrana Qadeer and Sourindra Mohan Ghosh
-The Hindu Business Line The priority for this government is to promote the medical care market, not ensure universal healthcare for the majority Those at the helm of policymaking in the country have been, for some time, strongly advocating austerity as the principle for public expenditure policies, particularly for the social sectors. Arvind Panagariya, the vice-chairperson of the NITI Aayog, suggests that “for just three-quarters of a per cent of the GDP”, 0.76...
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