-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 Indian Express Meghalaya mine collapse: Terming it a 'serious issue,' the bench said 'it is a question of life and death.' The Supreme Court Thursday expressed “dissatisfaction” with the manner in which the Meghalaya government organised the operations to rescue the 15 miners trapped inside a rat-hole mine in the state. Terming it a “serious issue,” a two-judge bench comprising Justices A K Sikri and S Abdul Nazeer questioned why...

-The Hindu Cleaner stretches recorded across all Riverine States New Delhi: The water quality of the Ganga in 2018 has “improved over last year”, according to a written statement in the Rajya Sabha on Monday by junior Water Resources Minister Satyapal Singh. The statement said “dissolved oxygen” levels had improved at 39 locations, and “biological oxygen demand” (BOD) levels and faecal coliform had decreased at 42 and 47 locations respectively. These three parameters...

-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’...

-Scroll.in Instead, for a start, we should allow forests to regrow naturally. Planting trees creates a plantation, not a forest. India is again wasting valuable time, effort and resources on a national scale as it races to forestall an impending water crisis. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is conducting massive afforestation drives, planting native species. But a forest is a self-sown, self-regenerating community of plants and dependent organisms, from...