-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After a major thrust on highway during the last five years, the next government faces the prospect of a sharp slowdown in highway development due to funding constraints and rising project costs, primarily on account of a spike in land acquisition rates. The result: Only 4,600km of the announced 12,000km may actually be taken up during the current financial year. The situation is so grim that...

-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...

-The Hindu Data manipulation in the MGNREGA is leading to gross violations in its implementation Chunni Devi (name changed), an Adivasi woman in her late 20s, lives with her three under-nourished children in Mahuadand, Jharkhand. Her husband died more than a year ago due to the cold conditions in the area. She is yet to get a widow’s pension and ration under the Antyodaya category. She is sceptical of working under the...

-The Economic Times With the general election a few months away, the central government has begun crunching the numbers in preparation for a comprehensive programme to help farmers tide over challenges posed by a dip in prices and dwindling incomes. The government is keen on a more substantive intervention than a loan waiver at the central level to alleviate agrarian distress besides stepping up investments in the sector, having concluded that writing...

-The Indian Express On October 30, at the meeting of the Financial Stability and Development Council chaired by Jaitley and attended by Urjit Patel among others, the central bank is learnt to have downplayed the issue of liquidity crunch. While the Reserve Bank of India said two weeks ago that there is no sign of a liquidity crunch, its own latest data shows that banks’ credit outstanding to the Micro, Small and...