-The Indian Express Wells dry up across 8 districts, storage down to less than 8%, residents trudge long distances, officials brace for worst drinking water crisis in 40 years. Beed/ Parbhani (Maharashtra): Seventy-year-old Parobai Shinde, carrying an aluminium pot that has seen better days, is briskly walking the 2-km stretch from her home in Manyarwadi village in Georai taluka in Beed district to Bharat Sonmali’s field. Sonmali is reploughing his 30...

-Hindustan Times Three years ago, when representatives from Sukhbir Agro approached farmers in Punjab proposing they sell their farm waste to the company to generate bio-energy, no one believed them. “They proposed to buy our waste… We didn’t believe them,” said Amolak Singh, a farmer. However, as the farmers slowly came around to the idea the green benefits of this move became apparent. Every November, farmers in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and...

-The Hindu Across the country, unless adequate jobs are created for the large Labour force, the frustration of the youth is not likely to be contained. In Gujarat, the Patels or Patidars, who constitute about 15 per cent of the State’s population, are an economically and politically dominant upper caste. As successful farmers, as small and big industrialists, as traders as well as non-resident Gujaratis, spread practically all over the world, they...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's Labour arm has walked out of the countrywide strike that 11 unions had called on September 2 to press for a 12-point charter of demands. A recent government survey had ranked the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) as India's largest trade union body with a membership of 62 lakh. Congress-affiliated Intuc came a distant second with 39 lakh members while the CPI's Labour wing, Aituc,...

-The Indian Express The big question in the minds of everyone who can recall is: Will 2015 for Marathwada turn out worse than the worst-ever drought of 1972? Parbhani (Maharashtra): Sadashiv Kathurappa Gajmal, 44, has long stopped introducing himself as a farmer. “I am a Labourer,” says this father of four and owner of 2.5 acres of land in Charthana village of Parbhani’s Jintur taluka. Unfortunately, he has had little or no...