-The Hindu Business Line The PM Krishi Sinchai Yojana smacks of poor watershed planning. As with earlier schemes, accountability is absent The launch of any new scheme by the government always creates a sense of déjà vu. First, priorities, plans and programmes constantly change depending upon who’s in power at the Centre; second, schemes, new or old, deliver identical outcomes. The Ganga Action Plan (GAP), Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP), MNREGA were all...

-Business Standard Govt concludes it has no mapped information on perennial rivers, dams & irrigation projects which would be impacted by coal mining To be finalised soon by the government, the number of inviolate coal blocks where mining will be banned is likely to be reduced from the originally identified 206 to less than 35. The environment ministry has decided to again dilute the parameters for identifying which of India's 793 blocks...

-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 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...

-Livemint.com With barely weeks left for the to begin its retreat, it is emerging that India will close the year with a deficit much higher than what was initially forecast  Another year and another bad monsoon. What were the odds? The India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast this year’s monsoon—like last year—to be below normal. At that time, we all hoped that the IMD had got it wrong—the economy was on the...