-India Water Portal Deconstructing the traditional narrow engineering based policy discourses around floods and droughts and connecting them to social and cultural realities is the need of the hour in India. India has witnessed extreme weather conditions this year. While parts of the north and south have battled drought like conditions this summer, the northeast and western Coastal Areas witnessed heavy rains and floods. While climate change has been highlighted as one...

-The Hindu Kerala needs to adopt watershed-based master planning and review building byelaws The unique geography of Kerala, with its steep climbdown from 900m high elevations of the Western Ghats to the coast of Malabar, has resulted in a land with a vast riverine network. There are no less than 44 fast flowing rivers that drain the rainwater Kerala is blessed with into the Arabian Sea. It is a lifeline that supports...

-The Telegraph Shelters that can function as a a school or a vegetable market Kharagpur: Two IIT Kharagpur professors who have designed the shelters that saved thousands of lives after Cyclone Fani hit Odisha last Friday said the lessons of the 1999 supercyclone were the trigger behind their project. Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, professor of civil engineering department at the institute, and Gopal Chandra Mitra, a visiting professor at the department, took one-and-a-half years...

-The Hindu Business Line Eminent agriculture scientist MS Swaminathan, Chairman of the much discussed Farmers’ Commission whose report mooted an MSP at 50 per cent above cost, feels that income support can be given in the form of free inputs or higher procurement as well. While welcoming ‘PM-Kisan’, he says cash transfer should not become a form of patronage and that the focus should shift from loan write-offs to long-term policies....

-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...