-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 New Indian Express According to education experts, better awareness and exposure is the reason why Kerala is doing better when it comes to pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher secondary education Kerala is going great guns when it comes to education when compared to the rest of the country. The fact was proven by the Annual Status of Education Report (2018) which was published in January. The study, which covered 596 districts,...

-CitizenMatters.in Sushil was attending 10th standard at the school in his village, when his parents decided to move to a city. They had found seasonal work in a brick kiln there. Sushil’s only option was to move to the kiln site and work alongside his parents. He had given up hopes of completing high school education, when he realised that other child labourers at the kiln were going to a ‘classroom’...

-Financial Express Forget the fanfare about the PM-AASHA scheme that is designed to lend greater price support to farmers, procurement of pulses and oilseeds by the public sector is likely to drop by more than a third in the kharif 2018 season from the year-ago period. The decline in procurement comes after two consecutive kharif seasons in which it surged and reached a critical mass, compared with very small quantities earlier. Just...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...