-The Hindu Paddy and sugarcane are India’s most water-guzzling crops — using up over half of the country’s total irrigation water resources — but procurement policies and water and power subsidies are skewing profitability and distorting crop decisions, says a recent study done by agricultural economist Ashok Gulati, and Gayathri Mohan. It has been published as a working paper by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). The ICRIER...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Abhijit Prabhudesai, a Goa-based environmentalist, has travelled to Delhi six times since last December to appear before the National Green Tribunal’s (NGT’s) principal bench, which is hearing his petition on environmental concerns regarding the Mopa airport in north Goa. His plea was being heard by NGT’s Pune bench until the tribunal started facing severe shortage of judicial members, closing it down temporarily, along with its regional benches...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org Bt-cotton occupies 90 per cent of the land under cotton in India – and the pests that this GM variety was MEAnt to safeguard against, are back, virulently and now pesticide-resistant – destroying crops and farmers The black scars dotting the green bolls of a wilting cotton plant on Ganesh Wadandre’s farm carried a message for scientists working on the ‘white gold’: go find a new antidote. “Those are the entry points,”...

-Hindustan Times A 6% fall between 2015-16 and 2016-17 was reported in RTI applications filed with the 1,950 public authorities of the Central government, which receives maximum information applications followed by Maharashtra and Karnataka. The right to information law MEAnt to empower Indians and bring transparency in governance appeared to be losing steam with the number of queries going down mainly because of stone-walling of information by officials and slow disposal of...

-The Economic Times In over a decade, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been instrumental in providing employment to rural households. One of its key provisions is that once the work week is completed, the worker must be paid within 15 days. Millions depend on the timely payment of these wages. The payments process has made many strides in the last decade, from cash payments to wages being...