-Business Standard Till the time you don’t give water to a farmer’s fields, you can’t save him from suicide. Intervening in a debate in the state Assembly on July 21, 2015, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra remarked that the state has 40 per cent of the country’s large dams, “but 82 per cent area of the state is rainfed. Till the time you don’t give water to a farmer’s fields, you can’t...

-Economic and Political Weekly Despite intensive implementation of the Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan, many districts of Maharashtra are reeling under severe drought. This raises questions over the usefulness of the JSA in drought-proofing, especially in the way it is being implemented. Please click here to read the article. ...

-The Hindu Cases of acute encephalitis syndrome have seen a spike in Muzaffarpur this year, already claiming more than a hundred lives. Jacob Koshy reports on the appalling state of health care in Bihar, even as the debate on what is causing the deaths rages on For three days, Bihari Mahato and Shyam Babu Saha’s families have shared a hospital bed. The two daily-wage labourers, who have had to give up work...

-The Hindu The new GDP series has some methodological and sampling problems Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian recently claimed in a paper that India’s GDP growth from 2011-12 to 2016-17 was likely to have been overestimated. The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council has rejected this claim, stating that his paper would “not stand the scrutiny of academic or policy research standards”. In a conversation moderated by T.C.A. Sharad Raghavan, Pronab Sen...

-The Times of India NAGPUR (Maharashtra): Changing weather conditions in Vidarbha over the past few years have spelt doom for orange cultivation in the region. In the near seven-decade history of orange plantations here, this is the first time that an alarming 60% orange orchards have gone completely dry and, for all purposes, died this year. The loss is stark in Warud tehsil of Amravati district followed by Katol and Narkhed tehsils...