-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...

-TheWire.in aquifers at all levels are being depleted. There is thus an urgent need to review and enact the long-pending model groundwater bill. As winter tips into summer, the next round of water struggles will begin. By February, hand pumps across rural India will start going dry. People in urban centres, mostly small towns living off small stores of groundwater, will start getting increasingly erratic supply. The government will once again initiate...

-The Hindu Tackling drought must be the immediate priority for administrators across the country The coming elections to the Lok Sabha, crucial to the future of our democracy, our pluralism, our federalism, are only a few weeks away. But something else, something urgent, something is already upon us. And something that is going to coincide with the elections. A drought. The rains have failed us. Nothing new, one might say. True, except that the...

-The Hindu Divers from Navy, other agencies reach spot Guwahati: The search for at least 13 miners trapped in a water-filled coal mine in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills since December 13 will resume on Sunday, with divers from the Navy and experts from other agencies reaching the spot on Saturday afternoon. Teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the State Disaster Response Force, not equipped to undertake operations in narrow ‘rat-hole’...

-The Hindu Business Line Researchers say that environmental problem of groundwater depletion is much more serious than carbon dioxide emissions associated with it New Delhi: Over-extraction of groundwater is a major environmental challenge in many parts of India. It is not only leading to rapid decline in groundwater reserves but also contributing to India’s carbon emissions, a new study has warned. Billions of litres of groundwater pumped out every year contributes to carbon...