Subsidies that enable unregulated cultivation of water-intensive crops such as wheat and paddy are contributing to the crisis

Assailant assailant taking an aim at Adil (X) NEW DELHI: A chilling 11-second video showing a man being shot dead in broad daylight has gone viral on social media, triggering panic in Uttar Pradesh's Meerut district and prompting a police investigation. The video, reportedly filmed by one of the assailants, shows the victim lying on the ground as another man fires three bullets into his chest at close range.The incident is believed to have taken place near a tubewell in the forested area of Narhada village, under Lohiannagar police station, according to news agency PTI.

Pakistan does not need to wait until 2050 to discover what extreme water stress looks like. We are already living its arithmetic

Pakistan does not need to wait until 2050 to discover what extreme water stress looks like. We are already living its arithmetic

AI detects a farmer’s field has been irrigated and automatically shuts off the tubewell. A PepsiCo field agent, sitting hundreds of kilometres away, spots a stressed patch on their dashboard, traces it to a grid of faulty sprinklers and informs the farmer. A grain trader in Punjab scans a wheat sample with a computer vision device and gets a quality report without a lab in sight. This isn’t a glimpse of the future. It’s already happening, as AI becomes part of everyday farming. India’s agritech story has long been about digitising fragmented parts of farming, from crop monitoring and procurement to storage and advisory services. AI has started to connect those pieces. Instead of simply collecting farm data, it is enabling decisions that can improve yields, reduce losses, lower input costs, and make markets more transparent. Today, India’s agritech landscape runs on thousands of startups, from DeHaat and Ninjacart on the supply chain side to Fasal and AgNext on farm intelligence. Each startup is solving a different piece of the puzzle. The hardest part, however, has always been making technology work across smallholder farms, fragmented supply chains and unpredictable weather. Today, AI is helping bridge that gap. We spoke with...

YouTube video by Zahid Gishkori