-The Indian Express Stress faced by certain industries, drought in some areas hurt patronage of financial schemes for MSMEs, says State Level Bankers’ Committee report Ahmedabad: The Union government’s high profile financial aid schemes meant to support the micro, small and medium enterprises of the country have not performed as well as expected in Gujarat, a report of the State Level Bankers’ Committee (SLBC) released on Tuesday showed. Districts such as...

-The Indian Express As the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet-train project gets clearance to run through the Thane creek, environmentalists and birders aren’t too happy. The Flamingo yoga pose (the forward stretch of the torso while balancing on one leg) might have given you sore muscles, but tear away from the pain and you can enjoy watching the yoga pose’s inspiration flocking on Mumbai’s wetlands and creeks in their signature pose, feeding and mating....

-Down to Earth While other states had declared drought months ago, Gujarat govt kept calling it a “scarcity of water” While other states like Karnataka, Maharshtra, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh had declared drought at the very offset of the southwest monsoon, and began work on mitigation measures, the Gujarat government remained silent despite receiving deficit rainfall in most of the districts. Until yesterday, the Gujarat government had been terming the situation...

-The Indian Express For governments both at the Centre and in the concerned states, the most sensible option is to act fast. After two years of relatively good rains, large parts of Maharashtra (especially the Marathwada region and the adjoining districts of Jalgaon, Nashik, Ahmednagar, Sholapur, Amravati and Yavatmal), North Gujarat, Saurashtra, Kutch and North Karnataka are reeling under drought. What is different this time is that it has been induced...

-The Hindu Business Line Many regions saw rain deficits; Maharashtra, Karnataka have already declared a drought New Delhi: Even though many States have declared a drought-like situation in some pockets of their respective territories, agricultural input companies are putting up a brave fight saying the situation is not all that bad and hoping it would have little impact on their bottomlines. While the Met department, in its end-of-season report, said the country as...