-Hindustan Times The Atal Bhujal Yojana will be launched in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh The government has finalised the contours of a Rs 6,000-crore scheme to tackle the country’s depleting groundwater level, almost a year-and-a-half after finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the plan in the Union Budget. Called the Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABY) and piloted by the Union water resources ministry, the scheme now needs the cabinet’s...

-The Financial Express Over 14 crore households who cultivate on land owned by others under a formal lease agreement or even under a temporary arrangement overseen by the gram Panchayats or other official functionaries may soon start getting assorted sops doled out to “farmers” by the government just as their land-owing counterparts do. According to official sources, the definition of farmer will be changed via a gazzette notification to include cultivators...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Indian lawmakers who win closely fought elections often pay off their local political debts by engineering the award of village road-building jobs to contractors from their caste, a US-French study has found. It has added that these roads have a higher probability of never being built. The two major findings by Jacob N. Shapiro from Princeton University and Jonathan Lehne and Oliver Vanden Eynde from the Paris School of...

-Hindustan Times Gyan Chandra, 45, of Bhauri village in Sitapur had taken a loan of Rs 5 lakh from a finance firm in 2015 to purchase a tractor. Loan recovery agents allegedly crushed a Dalit farmer under a tractor in Sitapur on Saturday when he failed to deposit an arrear of the loan he had taken from a finance company, police quoted the victim’s brother as saying. Assistant superintendent of police (ASP), Sitapur,...

-ThePrint.in IGP Mamta Singh says since most rapists are known to victims, the problem seems to be that women and their families have ‘too much faith’ in men around them. Chandigarh: Haryana has witnessed nine cases of rape in the past one week alone, raising serious questions about the competence of the police, their sensitivity to such crimes and the larger issue of the increased targeting of women in a state known...