Increasingly erratic rainfall patterns related to climate change pose a major threat to food security and economic growth, water experts have said, arguing for greater investment in water storage. In a report by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), experts said Africa and Asia were likely to be hardest hit by unpredictable rainfall, and urged policymakers and farmers to try to find ways of diversifying sources of water. The IWMI...

A Central team, led by a senior official of the Union Agriculture Ministry, arrived in West Bengal on Wednesday and held a meeting with Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and three key Ministers and Departmental Secretaries before leaving for spot visits to the 11 districts declared drought-affected by the State government. Finance Minister Asim Kumar Dasgupta, who was also present at the meeting, told journalists at the Secretariat that the eight-member team...

There’s suddenly a flurry of activity in Karotia, a nondescript village in West Bengal’s Burdwan district. Lately, a lot of politicians and state government officials have been visiting the village, and they say work on a nearly forgotten 14km irrigation canal is going to start soon. It’s been nearly 36 years since the state government first proposed to dig the canal, recalls Azizur Haque, the local panchayat chief. It was to...

In some remote villages in India, which are most unlikely to pose as models of development, a quiet rejuvenation is taking place, with communities learning to adapt to the climate change reality of the country today. Everyone knows by now that one of the foremost signs of climate change for the country is the changing pattern of the monsoon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already forecast shorter yet...

Governor M..H. Farook today declared eight more districts as drought-hit, bringing the entire state in the parched bracket ahead of a central team visit. With this, the memorandum of demands to be forwarded to the Union government, seeking financial assistance to mitigate the effects of drought, will be redesigned. It is now pegged at around Rs 3,000 crore against the earlier Rs 2,157 crore. An eight-member central team, led by managing director...