It is mostly caused by deliberate neglect and designed failure of the way we manage water and land

It’s drought time again. Nothing new in this announcement. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable cycle of nature we must live with.

The Maharashtra government has decided to launch a project with $85 million funding from the Asian Development Bank, which will augment the agriculture infrastructure in the State.

The project is named Agribusiness Infrastructure Development Investment Program (AIDIP) and aims to achieve accelerated investment in agriculture sector and to support related infrastructure in rural areas. Funds would be used for expanding the whole agriculture product value chain in the State.

New Delhi: Now, diagnosing multi-drug resistant TB (MDR TB) patients will take less than two hours. India has cleared the proposal to roll out a new diagnostic test GeneXpert across 18 sites that will test and confirm MDR TB within 120 minutes. About 99,000 Indians suffering from TB are becoming drugresistant every year. However, the diagnostic tools available take two days to about four months to confirm a single drug-resistant case during which time the air-borne disease spreads to others. The new test aims to increase diagnosis of the disease by at least seven-fold.

The extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XXDR-TB) strain in 11 patients in the city has inadvertently highlighted the deplorable condition of hospitals treating the disease, giving them a new lease of life. The state government with help from the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) has decided to pump in Rs80 lakh as initial assistance for upkeep and modernisation of these hospitals.

Maharashtra government will spend Rs. 800 crore on the first phase of a health scheme for the poor, which is slated to benefit nearly 50 lakh families from eight districts, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar said at a function here on Wednesday.

Under the ‘Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana,' any family earning below Rs. 1 lakh per annum can get free medical treatment and care worth Rs. 1.5 lakh a year.

The Maharashtra government launched the Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayi Arogya Yojana here on Sunday, enabling families with annual income of less than Rs. 1 lakh to avail free medical facilities worth Rs. 1.5 lakh. Health Minister Suresh Shetty announced that this scheme, when fully implemented, would benefit close to 2.5 crore families.

Ratnakar Golewar, 42, a farmer from Warud in Amravati district, was quite happy with the yield in his 7-acre orange orchard this year.
“I had borrowed Rs1 lakh for overhauling the drip irrigation in the orchard, and for fertilizers and pesticides. I was hopeful of repaying the loan, especially since arrivals of the mandarin variety oranges in the international market are quite less during this period.”

The state government is adamant in providing daily ration food to children aged between six months and three years in the tribal areas of Melghat in Amravati district. However, social activists and NGOs working in the area alleged that the food is not palatable and is being thrown away leading to a huge loss to the exchequer.

An HC bench comprising Chief Justice Mohit Shah and Justice DY Chandrachud, who suggested to the project officer of Melghat area to provide cooked food to children, seemed to agree with the petitioners.