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Correspondent

21 August 2024 at 3:50:16 pm

Arid State

Maharashtra has finally put an official number on a crisis that farmers have been experiencing for weeks. The state government has declared 265 of its 358 talukas drought-affected, activating the first stage of its drought-management framework. The scale of the distress should make this more than another seasonal relief exercise. It is a reminder that water stress is no longer an episodic crisis but a recurring governance challenge. The state received 798.2 mm of rain against a normal 970.9...

Arid State

Maharashtra has finally put an official number on a crisis that farmers have been experiencing for weeks. The state government has declared 265 of its 358 talukas drought-affected, activating the first stage of its drought-management framework. The scale of the distress should make this more than another seasonal relief exercise. It is a reminder that water stress is no longer an episodic crisis but a recurring governance challenge. The state received 798.2 mm of rain against a normal 970.9 mm between June 1 and September 26, a deficit of 18 percent. The first drought trigger is activated when rainfall falls more than 25 percent below normal and is accompanied by a prolonged dry spell of 21 days. Though the aggregate state deficit is lower than that threshold, the taluka-level assessment has established the conditions required for intervention. Except for five districts, rainfall has been deficient across the state. The government has ordered a stay on the recovery of agriculture-related loans and restructuring of crop loans, while extending concessions on electricity bills for agricultural pumps. Employment Guarantee Scheme norms are to be relaxed; food grains provided to farmers and arrangements made for drinking water and fodder. Crop-loss surveys will determine the eventual financial assistance. While these measures can cushion the shock, they cannot solve the problem. Maharashtra has lived with drought long enough for drought relief to have become an administrative routine. The more difficult question is why the state repeatedly finds itself having to mobilise the same machinery. Tankers, fodder camps, loan restructuring and employment guarantees are indispensable when the rains fail. But they are essentially the politics and economics of response, not resilience. The state has considerable experience in watershed development, farm ponds, check dams, groundwater recharge and other forms of water conservation. Yet the effectiveness of such interventions depends less on announcing them than on where they are built, whether they are maintained and whether groundwater extraction is regulated. Large-scale water-conservation works announced as part of the present relief package must therefore be judged by measurable outcomes rather than expenditure. There is a larger agricultural question. A state with highly variable rainfall cannot indefinitely expand water-intensive cropping patterns in regions whose hydrology cannot support them. Crop choices, irrigation efficiency and groundwater management have to become part of drought policy rather than being treated as separate subjects. The present declaration should consequently be viewed as both relief and warning. While the relief is urgent, the warning is structural. The state government cannot control the monsoon but it can decide how much water it captures when the rains arrive, how efficiently it uses what it stores and how resilient its farmers are when the skies fail. A drought code can declare an emergency. But only sustained water management can prevent the emergency from becoming routine.

Algorithms Without Guardians

Correspondent
Feb 5
3 min read

The Ghaziabad tragedy is not a freak accident but a policy failure born of digital neglect and adult abdication.

Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh

The deaths of three minor sisters in Ghaziabad is a troubling indicator of India’s refusal to treat digital addiction among children as a serious social risk requiring regulation, literacy and early intervention.


At 16, 14 and 12, the sisters belonged to a generation that has grown up almost entirely inside screens. Their addiction to a Korean task-based online gaming app, established from a diary recovered from their home, suggests that the game had become central to how they understood themselves. When their parents barred them from playing, the girls apparently made a joint decision to end their lives.


What happened in Ghaziabad was an extreme manifestation of a broader, poorly acknowledged reality that Indian children are spending formative years in unregulated digital environments that shape behaviour, self-worth and emotional resilience while the adults responsible for them remain largely unprepared.


Many digital products aimed at adolescents are designed to reward compliance, persistence and immersion through points, rankings, praise and ‘tasks.’ Over time, these systems can displace offline sources of validation. Competence in the game becomes competence in life; failure or exclusion becomes existential rather than recreational.


Psychologists have warned for years that such dynamics can narrow a child’s emotional universe, especially when family life, schooling or peer relationships are already strained.


What happens when that universe collapses is not always predictable as India has no robust framework to help families navigate this transition. Most parents lack even basic digital literacy. They do not know what their children are playing, watching or internalising.


For many children, books have become an occasional obligation rather than a daily refuge. Screens now dominate leisure, learning and identity, leaving little space for the slow, solitary discipline that reading demands. What was once a habit of attention has become an economy of distraction.


As screens have expanded, books and deep reading have receded, taking with them the habits of reflection and emotional self-regulation they once quietly taught.


Furthermore, schools offer little backup and quality mental-health education remains marginal with teachers are seldom trained to identify behavioural signs of digital dependency. Adolescents who are emotionally isolated but digitally hyper-connected often pass unnoticed, so long as exam scores hold up. By the time distress surfaces, it is already acute.


The state’s response has been conspicuously inadequate. India regulates physical risks to children with enthusiasm. But the digital ecosystems where children spend hours daily operate in a regulatory vacuum. Gaming apps face minimal scrutiny beyond data and payments. There is no meaningful enforcement of age-appropriateness, no requirement for mental-health safeguards, and no obligation to provide crisis interventions for vulnerable users. Advisory guidelines exist, but they rely almost entirely on parental vigilance that policymakers know does not exist.


When tragedies occur, no one address the structural issue. Digital childhood has arrived without a safety architecture. Responsibility is diffused between parents who feel powerless, platforms that optimise for engagement, and regulators who treat online harm as either a moral panic or someone else’s problem.


Blaming one app will achieve little. India is among the world’s largest gaming and social-media markets. Its children are valuable users, and its regulatory choices shape global platform behaviour. Yet it has been slow to acknowledge that attention extraction can be as harmful as substance abuse when left unchecked, particularly for minors.


The Ghaziabad case should therefore prompt less outrage and more clarity. Children need graduated digital autonomy, not unrestricted access followed by sudden prohibition. Parents need tools, training and institutional support, not retrospective guilt. Schools need to integrate mental-health monitoring into daily practice, not treat it as an annual seminar topic. And the state needs to move beyond advisories towards enforceable standards for child-facing digital products.


None of this will eliminate risk as adolescence has always been volatile. But refusing to adapt to the realities of screen-mediated childhood makes that volatility more dangerous. 


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