-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...

-The Indian Express In 2014-15, the first year under of the NDA government when Prime Minister Narendra Modi had dismissed MGNREGA as “the living monument of UPA’s failure’, the person-days generated was just 166 crore. In an indicator of rural distress, the last year of the NDA government shows a marked increase in the demand for jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Official data show that...

-Newsclick.in The scheme, which is similar to MGNREGS, is an employment-of-last-resort programme in order to provide minimum livelihood security to the poorest of the poor in the urban areas in absence of enough employment opportunity in the economy. In the midst of increasing unemployment in the country, along with Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) for the rural poor, the state government of Kerala has an interesting employment-of-last-resort programme for...

-The Hindu Business Line Working from a mud house in a remote Maharashtra village, Rahibai Popere is taking farming back to its roots Pune: Twenty years ago, when her grandson fell ill, Rahibai Popere was convinced vegetables and foodgrains containing ‘poison’ had made the child unhealthy. She asked her son to stop buying vegetables and foodgrains grown using hybrid seeds, chemicals and fertilisers. And then started a journey to conserve and save indigenous...

-Newsclick.in It remains to be seen how many political parties pledge to protect the urban poor from eviction and homelessness and work for inclusive ‘Smart Cities’. Over 30 civil society groups consisting of slum dwellers, civil society organisations, women groups, other groups working amongst the urban poor, disabled women groups, street vendors, housing rights activists and so on assembled in Delhi on February 28 to set a new discourse for 2019. This...