-Hindustan Times India’s June-September monsoon has been deficient so far and quite uneven in its spread, with the rain-bearing system entering a phase that will largely determine whether the country can escape a drought for the first time in six years.   Overall, rains have been 9% lower than normal, with sharper deficits in some areas. Rainfall during August-September, the remaining two months of the rainy season, would be poor at 84%, the...

-Business Standard Successors to Millennium Development Goals should be achievable - and clearly written "By 2030 reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births." Everyone understands what this statement means. It is simple, comprehensible, concise, specific and quantifiable. In September 2015, the Milennium Development Goals, or MDGs, will be replaced by sustainable development goals, or SDGs. There are several parallel channels flowing into SDG formulation. One...

-The Times of India Two sturdy, grey Metro pillars near the Yamuna Bank station are covered with graffiti of a different kind. The walls under the bridge have alphabets scribbled over them and the place echoes with the murmur of children reciting poems as if trying to compete with the rattling of the metro. This is where Rajesh Kumar Sharma, a shop owner, spends his mornings, teaching the 3Rs and more...

-The Telegraph Mayong (Morigaon): It was just some weeks ago that Jogeswar Bangthai, Ganesh Saikia and Mohammad Anar Ali were dreaming of a bumper crop as they gazed at their fields that had turned golden with the ripe paddy waiting to be harvested. A few days more and their granaries would brim over. Or so they thought. Then came the rain that refused to go away. In this fabled land of black magic, farmers...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...