-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party on Monday kept its promise of free Water - 20 kilolitres per month or an average of about 660 litres a day per family - but it came with a rider and a whammy for bigger Water consumers. The rider is that if consumption exceeds 20 kl, you would be billed for the entire Water consumed, and the whammy was that...

-World Resources Institute India struggles with Water scarcity, a problem that poses especially huge implications for the country's food security and rural livelihoods. The country has long-battled its scarcity issues through Watershed Development, a participatory approach to improve Water management through afforestation and reforestation, sustainable land management, soil and Water conservation, Water-harvesting infrastructure, and social interventions. But while Watershed development has been employed in communities throughout India, its potential long-term costs...

-Survival International Anthropologist Dr. Felix Padel works with the tribes of Odisha in eastern India, including the Dongria Kondh, for whom Survival International has campaigned for 10 years. Felix is the great great grandson of Charles Darwin and lives in a remote village in Odisha. In this interview, he talks to Survival about the Dongria Kondh's relationship to their mountains, their heroic struggle against Vedanta, Darwin's evolution theory and the experience...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Government spending of over Rs 46,000 crore on infrastructure augmentation under UPA's flagship JNNURM scheme seems to have improved key indicators of urban life in India and reached the poorest of poor. The recent National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data shows that over 90% of slumdwellers feel Water drainage, sewerage and garbage collection and disposal have improved. The NSSO also said 24% of slums had benefited...

-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of Water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...