-Hindustan Times Barmer district collector Himanshu Gupta said traditional water bodies will be revived under MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Barmer: The Rajasthan government plans to revive traditional water bodies to fight drinking water crisis in drought-affected areas, officials said. In the absence of adequate monsoon rain, people have been depending on traditional water bodies in remote desert areas of western Rajasthan. Barmer district collector Himanshu Gupta said traditional water...

-The Hindu Say policymakers induce farmers to adopt incongruent crop pattern, causing water crisis Pune: The water crisis in Maharashtra is a “policy-induced failure”, according to economists and water academics who have specifically warned of the ‘desertification’ of the parched Marathwada region in the near future. “It is the ecological illiteracy of policy-makers and the selfishness of the power elite in inducing farmers across Marathwada to adopt a crop pattern that is not...

-Down to Earth Reflections on Supreme Court order to evict ‘illegitimate’ tribals from the forests There is an ominous significance to the February 13, 2019 order of the Supreme Court on “illegitimate” forest-dwellers. When we first heard of it, we felt a rising dismay and shock at this judicial legitimation of unparalleled atrocity against the tribals. The order is nothing less than the final legitimised expropriation of the tribal communities (poor landless)...

  The Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation (MoWR, RD & GR) in its latest report has identified arsenic hotspots across the country, most notably in the states of Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Please consult chart-3 to get an idea about the geographical spread of arsenic hotspots in India. On the basis of arsenic concentration in the range 0.01-0.05 mg per litre...

-TheWire.in Democracy cannot be held prisoner to random sampling, especially when the EC won’t tell us what happens if a discrepancy between EVM tally and VVPAT slips is detected. “Check one grain of rice, and you will know if the whole vessel of rice is cooked.” This is an analogy that is often used to show that a small sample is enough to be sure of the result. But what happens if...