-Livemint.com The efforts of the government in revamping the crop insurance and land titling schemes are long-term solutions which will take time to bear results The agricultural sector is facing its worst moment in the last three decades. The last time India saw such distress caused by back-to-back deficient rains was during the drought of 1986-87 and 1987-88. The severity of the situation is evident from the stories of migration and...

-The Hindu Seventy of the 170 public wells identified have been dredged and cleaned Bidar (Karnataka): The district administration has started a project to preserve old open wells in public places in order to push up the aquifer and protect the ancient legacy of water management. The severe drought conditions of the year have pushed the officials to clean the wells, some of which are around 500 years old. Many of them were...

-PTI New Delhi: The Rural Development Ministry will carry out a pilot study on environmental benefits and green outcomes of rural flagship scheme MGNREGA in seven states with the help of United Nations Development Programme. The project will be conducted in 14 gram panchayats, two each from seven agro-ecological zones of the country -- Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Guajrat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN),...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government has rubbished media reports that performance of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme in the current fiscal year will suffer due to arrears of wages of over Rs 8000 crore in 2015-16. Stating that certain facts in the reports have been highlighted without appreciating the larger picture, the government has clarified that is committed to ensure flow of adequate resources to the programme...

-Business Standard After a hotter than usual summer, a better monsoon would boost agriculture, rural demand Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan's hopes of a normal monsoon this year - after two back-to-back droughts - to boost rural demand could be fulfilled. Though the summer is expected to be hotter than usual, global and domestic forecasts point to good rains this year. Officials of both the weather department and private forecasters said the...