Women-led and women’s rights organizations are on the frontlines of today’s humanitarian crises—but many are at risk of disappearing. As global needs rise due to conflict, climate change, and displacement, deep cuts to foreign aid are threatening organizations that provide life-saving services for women and girls. In March 2025, UN …
Even as we celebrate 60 years of Indian democracy, with millions of our people hungry, cynical and insecure, and living under the barrel of the gun (of the state or the extremists), we need to worry about the reach and quality of our political process. The National Rural Employment Guarantee …
Credit is one of the important inputs for rural development. The results will largely depend on the effective use of credit, and linkages developed with other requirements for the enterprise. The study on rural credit from various agencies such as commercial banks, regional rural banks, cooperative banks and District Rural …
In 1997, the Government of Mexico introduced a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program called Programa de Education, Salud, Y Alimentacion (Progresa), providing assistance to about 300, 000 extremely poor households. The essential premise of a CCT program is a cash transfer to households, conditioned on their participation in health, nutrition, …
Union minister for rural development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh defends reports of irregularities in implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in a interview with Sandip Das Problem areas in implementing NREGA We have to change the mindset of officials who have been in charge of rural development schemes since …
in a bid to stop pilferage in the Targeted Public Distribution System (tpds), the Union government plans to introduce food coupons for people below poverty line (bpl). Under the scheme initiated by the Union ministry of food and civil supplies, the coupons worth a fixed amount of cash, instead of …
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (nrega), 2006, is degenerating into yet another poverty alleviation scheme. At the same time, officials are congratulating themselves on the act's performance, and there is even talk of extending its scope. Their exhilaration betrays an ignorance of the contradictions between nrega's intent and ground …
India's Targeted Public Distribution System (tpds) gives subsidised essential commodities to economically weaker households. Till 1997, the system had supplied subsidised commodities to all Households under tpds are classed as Below Poverty Line (bpl) and Above Poverty Line (apl) groups based on income. bpl is further divided into bpl and …
the central government's food assistance schemes haven't worked. The 61st round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (nsso) report on Public Distribution System and Other Sources of Household Consumption, 2004-05, shows that only 28 per cent of the rural poor have benefited from any such scheme. For urban areas, the …
sampat Lal is not the protagonist of a typical Down To Earth story. He's the treasurer of a cooperative that runs a fair price shop in a Rajasthan village. Quite successfully, in fact. Lal belongs to a cooperative of mine workers. There are quite a few such cooperatives in Rajasthan …
A review of the implementation of the Asian Development Banks (adbs) water policy and water supply and sanitation (wss) projects in India has exposed its failings. In 2005, adb funded WaterAid, international ngo, to conduct an independent review of its own water policy implementation in South AsiaIndia, Bangladesh and Nepal. …
Judgement of the Delhi High Court on the decision of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) awarding contracts for providing cooked mid-day meals to students of Primary schools in Delhi dated 08/06/2007.
gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi on March 29, 2007, announced a Rs 13-crore scheme for the state's urban poor. The programme, called Garib Samriddhi Scheme, envisages, among other things, setting up 175,000 private toilets and 5,000 pay-and-use-toilets in slums over the next five years. It also plans to construct 250,000 …
Hope floated in drought-hit Mastapur village when people heard of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (nrega) in 2006. Residents of this village in Madhya Pradesh's Tikamgarh district thought of the scheme as the perfect opportunity to renovate their local tank to tide over a four-year long drought. For, under …
The Micro Financial Sector (Development & Regulations) Bill 2007 has been under the scanner of late. The bill proposes to make the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (nabard) the regulator of micro-finance sector in the country. Until now, the Reserve Bank of India has been regulating financial organisations …
a planning Commission expert committee recommended early in March that an autonomous body under the Union ministry of rural development (mord) be professionalised. The autonomous body
Most of the rural development models considered natural resource management as the means for rural transformation. The present paper reveals the impact of one such rural development models named "Adarsh Gaon Yojana" of Government of Maharashtra, which is based on natural resource management and watershed management. The study was carried …
Should we feel comfortable with the latest government claim that unemployment is coming down? The government says unemployment has come down due to growth. During the 2006-07 budget, finance minister P Chidambaram reiterated that growth rate must go up further for unemployment to go down. Development economists and government agencies …
the Union budget for 2007-08 is big on illusions, small on vision. Despite the hype about its tilt towards the agriculture sector, the budget has failed to put together a package to bail out the ailing sector. Also, despite being the first budget of the 11th Five-Year Plan, it has …
the 61st round of the National Sample Survey (nss) seems to suggest that the unemployment rate in the country has come down. But this statistic has to be read in context. The entire gamut of data generated by the survey also indicates that the unemployment rate based on daily status …
