-Livemint.com The capricious nature of groundwater has resulted in so much exploitation and overuse that we now have a consistent crisis. Presenting a roadmap for groundwater governance and information transparency using technology India is a groundwater civilization. Almost all Indians use groundwater, directly or indirectly, each day. This tradition goes back more than 2,000 years. India is criss-crossed with the most elegant wells that tap into the shallow aquifer. The oldest wells...

-Hindustan Times Heavy rains continued across Kerala on Friday, forcing authorities to open all five shutters of the Cheruthoni dam in Idukki for the first time in 40 years. Dams and rivers overflowed, parts of highways collapsed, and homes were swept away in severe flooding in more than half of Kerala on Friday in the third day of heavy downpour that has claimed the lives of 30 people and left nearly 54,000...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: As many as 237 tigers died in the past two years and 23 per cent of the deaths between 2012 and 2017 were caused by poaching, the government said on Friday. However, the government asserted that unnatural deaths "have not had an impact on tiger numbers, which are growing at the rate of 5.8 per cent per annum". "In 2016, 122 tigers died across the country while 115 died...

-PTI New Delhi: Delhi High Court on Wednesday decriminalised begging in the national capital, saying provisions penalising the act were unconstitutional, nearly three months after wondering aloud how it could be treated as an offence in a country where the government was unable to provide food or jobs. A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C. Hari Shankar said the inevitable consequence of the decision would be that prosecution...

-Newsclick.in Almost all the farmers from Sitarampur are not eligible under any of the farmers’ schemes in the state as they cultivate endowment lands. Ahead of the 2019 Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, the Telangana government has launched an insurance scheme for farmers, termed as ‘Rythu Bandhu Bheema’, but the real cultivators – landless tenant farmers, agricultural labourers who are considered to be most prone to distress among farming communities are not...