-The Times of India PILIBHIT: Raising concern over depleting groundwater, State Wetland Authority (SWA) has decided to ban the cultivation of summer paddy that survives only on the groundwater. According to an estimate of the state agriculture department, summer paddy — the transplantation of which has already been started — is produced in around 3.5 lakh hectares in more than 20 districts of western UP stretched up to the Tarai region. The decision...
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Number crunching helps farmers manage water -Manu Moudgil
-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...
More »Deepening slowdown: on the Indian economy
-The Hindu Can the RBI’s reduction in borrowing costs help check the demand slowdown? India’s economy is inarguably slowing, and the latest estimates from the Central Statistics Office disconcertingly point to a deepening slowdown. GDP growth is projected to have eased to 6.6% in the October-December period. With the CSO now forecasting the full-year expansion at 7%, fiscal fourth-quarter growth is implicitly pegged at an even slower 6.5%. At that level, growth...
More »Rivers are critical for groundwater recharge -Manoj Misra
-Hindustan Times India’s groundwater recharge is not adequate even though drought conditions are making us extract more and more of the resource, and that the people are wasting too much water. In a report released recently, the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, the University of California, and the India Meteorological Department, Pune, said nearly 50% of the country is currently facing drought with at least 16% falling in the exceptional or...
More »How India's anganwadi system is getting some things very right despite its many flaws -Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta
-The Hindu ICDS is the world’s biggest mother and child nutrition and care programme It is an early spring morning. We are walking deep inside hilly country in Karnataka’s Malnad region. When the Monsoon comes, rainfall will be intense in these parts, and will continue for many months. This is coffee terrain. With the great tall trees above us, and the plantation ahead of us, we have been walking on this narrow path...
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