-VillageSquare.in With intensifying monsoons and deepening soil erosion, Assam is becoming one of India’s states most vulnerable to climate change, hurting food production and livelihoods in the process. Each year, during the monsoon, the mighty Brahmaputra River and its tributaries burst their banks and engulf huge tracts of farming and residential land in the remote north-eastern state of Assam, home to 34 million people. The state government, engineers and other experts are exploring...

-IndiaToday.in From Assam to Odisha and in many other states, floods were a natural phenomenon. But we turned them into monsoon mayhem by squeezing our rivers. Here is why we must rethink our response to this annual crisis. Every monsoon, lakhs of people in Indian states such as Bihar, Assam, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal are affected by floods when rivers swell and spread their waters amid pounding rain. Hundreds of men,...

-Newsclick.in Following the floods in June, Assam has seen periods of rain deficiency in the last two weeks, disrupting the paddy cultivation for farmers in the state. “Bohag Matho Eti Ritu Nohoi Nohoi Bohag Eti Maah Axomiya Jatir Ee Aayush Rekha Gono Jibonor Ee Xaah.” These lines by Bhupen Hazarika indicate that ‘Bohag’ (the starting month of the year), for the people of Assam, especially the farmers, is not merely a month or a season; it...

-ThePrint.in A hit to India’s rice output could lead to a major policy overhaul as it arrives on the back of a lower wheat harvest. New Delhi: After a severe heat wave in April-May singed India’s wheat crop, leading to a ban on exports, planting of rice, the main rain-fed crop in the ongoing kharif season, has been hit due to patchy rains in several states. Major rice-growing states such as Uttar Pradesh,...

-The Telegraph Lessons to take away from the two recent calamities in NorthEast It is never easy to rationalise tragedy. The two witnessed recently in the Northeast are no exceptions. One, the Assam Floods in which the state’s two major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Barak, and their tributaries wreaked havoc, killing nearly 200 people and, at one point, putting close to 4.5 million people in danger of starvation and disease. Two,...