-The Hindu Business Line Farm output at stake as rainfall deficit widens Ahmedabad: A continued dry spell in the current monsoon season has driven Gujarat to the brink of drought. The latest weather department data revealed that till September 9, Gujarat had a deficit of 21 per cent from the normal seasonal rainfall. Even as the kharif sowing is complete on 97 per cent of the area, the water storage conditions are not...

-The Statesman It's the same story every year. Heavy rains, huge volume of water spilling over the water channels and mismanagement of rivers in spate, leading to heavy floods inundating large parts of India. This year too the story is no different. Even as this article goes to print, Assam, West Bengal, Manipur, Odisha, Gujarat and Rajasthan almost a third of India is either facing floods or coping with a trail...

-The Indian Express We can add millions of hectares to irrigated land without building a single new dam. We just need to adopt a different method of managing the water already stored in them. One of the drivers of India’s irrigation sector has been the construction of large dams on our rivers, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously described as “the temples of modern India”. While these dams have helped increase India’s irrigated...

-The Hindu Vijayawada: As agricultural production in Andhra Pradesh is being increasingly impacted by adverse weather, farmers are searching for ways to mitigate the loss. Lost in desperation, they are not realising that there is a widely available tree which enriches the soil fertility multifold with little human intervention and negligible investments. Commonly known as ‘fencing plant’, it is known for many generations but the farming community has almost forgotten it under...

-The Indian Express Government’s insistence on acquisition is rooted in a rush to impose the Gujarat model on the rest of India. The development agenda of the Narendra Modi government implies industrialisation. The BJP’s 2014 mandate was indeed for job creation. The “neo-middle class”, which Modi defined when he was CM of Gujarat as made up of aspiring city dwellers who have just emerged from poverty, supported him more widely than the...