-India Today Groundwater is being extracted in Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan at a rate faster than it's replenished, according to the latest report of the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB). The status of groundwater extraction - the proportion of water drawn out to annual recharge - in Delhi and the three states is more than 100 per cent. In Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Lakshwadeep, Pondicherry and Daman and Diu, the...

-Economic and Political Weekly     Sustained and focused efforts have to be made by the Tamil Nadu state government to provide relief and rehabilitation to the drought affected people of the state. S Rajendran (myrajendran@gmail.com) is with the Department of Economics, Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu. Due to the failure of the north-east monsoon in December 2013, Tamil Nadu is witnessing drought like conditions this year, leading to poor agricultural productivity, rural distress,...

-The Hindu  India’s first aquifer atlas points to a sharp decline in groundwater levels in several parts of Delhi, West Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. The atlas, compiled by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) under the Union Ministry of Water Resources, says within the national capital, South-West Delhi is worst affected by depleting groundwater levels. “One of the critical challenges during the 12th Five-Year Plan is to evolve strategies to manage ground...

This is a collection of 45 select articles written by M.S. Swaminathan over the past 20 years. Arranged in six sections, they cover ‘sustainable development in Indian agriculture', ‘technology and evergreen revolution', ‘sustainable food security', ‘agrarian crisis', ‘WTO and Indian farmers', and ‘shaping India's agricultural destiny'. As Jeffrey Sachs says in his foreword, Swaminathan had “recognised already in the early days of India's green revolution that the new breakthroughs could create...

An analysis of the remote sensing data collected by Nasa satellites on the changes in vegetation in India during the last 25 years has confirmed the bad news: The growth rate of foodgrain production in India has been stagnant in the last decade, which crop statisticians have been aware of for some time now. A nine-member team of scientists from Nasa, the Boston University and the Indian Institute of Tropical...