Agriculture occupies a critical position in the country’s economy, ensuring food security, providing livelihoods, and indeed as a way of life for most rural people. Due to many reasons, growth in agriculture has been largely driven by groundwater based irrigation, powered by electricity.

Following the Supreme Court judgement of 2014 cancelling the allocation of more than 200 captive coal blocks, the government quickly brought in legislation and began the process of their reallocation. While the new allocation framework is an improvement over the previous regime, it suffers from many potentially serious shortcomings.