-The Times of India HIWARE BAZAR (Ahmednagar): Amid desperate denizens scrounging for water in the drought-affected parts of Maharashtra stands a village which has not felt the need to call a single water tanker for the last 21 years! While other villages in the arid Ahmednagar district are digging borewells even up to 400 feet, the underground water table in Hiware Bazar is so good that the precious commodity is available barely...

-PTI Ahmedabad: The Gujarat government has declared another 468 villages of parched Saurashtra and Kutch region as 'partially scarcity-hit', taking the total number of such villages reeling under acute water crisis, to nearly 1,000. In addition to the 526 villages which has been put in the red zone in beginning of the month, the state government has added 468 villages in the list through an official notification issued yesterday, taking the total...

-The Indian Express Every crisis produces its fall guy. This time, it is sugarcane that’s bearing the brunt of the blame for drought, especially in Maharashtra’s worst-affected Marathwada region. Sugarcane, no doubt, requires 2,100-2,200 mm of water, more than the 1,400 mm or so for paddy, 900 mm for cotton, 600 mm for jowar (sorghum) and arhar (pigeon-pea), 550 mm for wheat, and under 500 mm for soyabean and chana (chickpea). But then,...

-The Indian Express Because this time, it’s only rural producers, not urban consumers, who are feeling the heat This time’s drought has been a most unusual one. Even with three consecutive bad crops (kharif 2014, rabi 2015, and kharif 2015) and a fourth not-so-great one (thankfully, there’s been no big damage from the unseasonal rain and hail unlike in March 2015), annual consumer food price inflation is only 5.3 per cent. In the...

-Frontline Former psephologist Yogendra Yadav, now a member of the political collective Swaraj Abhiyan, recently toured India’s drought-affected districts. He called it a Samvedna Yatra. During the tour, he took note of the agony in rural areas affected by what he calls “one of the worst droughts in independent India” The drought, according to him, has left farmers and the larger rural community in extreme distress, leading to damaging changes in...