-The Hindu The scientists in the institute have identified a few locations in the higher reaches of Uttarakhand for “densification” of seismometers and river gauges to take the total number to 100 from 60. The National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research has begun field studies to put in place an early-warning system in the Himalayan States against major and sudden floods, rockslides, landslips, glacier lake...

-Down to Earth From floodplain identification to flood hazard map to availability of rain gauges, CAG report points out shortcomings in Kerala’s flood response Could poor response on part of the Kerala government have caused the massive floods of 2018 in the state? A recent report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has pointed at severe lapses on the part of the government in planning, capacity building, flood forecasting and dam...

-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 Hindu The labour force may have actually shrunk while the Modi government has been in office Attuned as we have become to political grandstanding on the purpose of democracy, we may not have imagined that something so prosaic as statistics can alter our perception of how it is actually working for us. The emergence over the past few months of data on employment, speaking precisely the lack of it, cannot but...

-The Hindu Business Line An analysis of how agri concerns will play out in four poll-bound States this year has some key takeaways for politicians ‘Rural distress’ became the major economic narrative to interpret the recent Assembly elections results for Gujarat, specifically the fact that rural support for the incumbent government was considerably less than the support from cities. The woes of the rural sector could be a bigger issue this year. Of...