-The Indian Express For several decades now, the Indian government and a variety of donor agencies have promoted and implemented "livelihoods projects". These projects depend upon women's self-help groups, or SHGs, to raise living standards - particularly of the 25 crore rural poor. In 2011, the Indian government launched the Rs 38,000 crore National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), also known as Ajeevika (reportedly now being merged with the Mahatma Gandhi National...

-The Hindu To get youth interested in agriculture research, the Agriculture Scientists Recruitment Board (ASRB) must undertake a special drive, noted farm scientist M.S. Swaminathan said on Friday. He said there should be a special analysis of the gaps in regional-level research, particularly in northeastern and tribal areas "as was done in the past." Special recruitment drives should be undertaken by inducting young scientist graduates from such regions and "grooming them intensively." He suggested...

-The Hindu Launched in 2006 by the JD(U)-BJP government at the time, the scheme provided money to all girls who enrolled in Class IX through their schools to buy themselves a cycle. The first independent, scientific evaluation of the impact of Bihar's cycles-for-girls programme has shown that the scheme significantly improved female school enrolment and substantially reduced the gender gap in secondary school enrolment. The study, by Karthik Muralidharan, an economist at...

-The Times of India   One in five rural households has none of three basic facilities - drinking water, electricity and sanitation - while only about 18% have access to all three. The India Rural Development Report 2012-13 released by Jairam Ramesh on Thursday also shows that while rural poverty has reduced significantly from over 40% to just 26%, there is large variation in poverty reduction between regions, districts and social classes...

Bihar Government's programme of distributing bicycles to school girls may be a modest intervention but is leading to big changes. A new research-based paper, brought out in August 2013, corroborates the success of the programme and testifies that it is leading to improved school enrollment of girls and arresting their dropout rates (See links below to read full paper and earlier studies on the subject).   Based on econometric and statistical models,...