-Down to Earth India's villages miss a golden chance to become drought-proof as more MGNREGA projects grind to a halt Almost half of India is currently under drought; for many districts this is the second-consecutive drought. Given this, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) should have been the key scheme to not only mitigate impacts of drought but also employ people in distress for earning. But an analysis of...
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The anatomy of India's middle class -Nikita Kwatra
-Livemint.com Contrary to the assumption that the middle class is an urban phenomenon, a considerable segment of the Indian middle class resides in rural areas, finds a new study The size of the Indian middle class has always been at the heart of the narrative around India’s economic development. And yet the term middle class remains arbitrarily defined with estimates of its size and characteristics varying significantly based on subjective notions of...
More »The problem with cherry-picking data -Arun Kumar
-The Hindu If it’s the government’s case that NSSO figures are suspect, what has it based policy decisions on? Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri said last week, “we definitely have a data crisis,” and blamed academics for creating a “false narrative”. Yet, at the heart of the data crisis in India is the Central government, which has been holding back important data. Most recently, it did...
More »Farm ponds that dot parched Marathwada may deplete groundwater in the long run -Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar
-The Times of India AURANGABAD: A patchwork of brown fields is visible from the air as you fly into this drought-hit region in rural Maharashtra. But amid the dry land is a growing mosaic of blue and brown squares and rectangles. These are farm ponds: Large earthen structures that have spread across rural Maharashtra in the past five years, thanks to a raft of central and state subsidies. The ponds were conceived...
More »Why are urban and rural voters dissimilar? -Narendar Pani
-The Hindu Business Line Vote shares are generally higher in Rural India, because of the centrality of political power in meeting the needs of communities Well before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls have reached the half-way mark there has been a firm reaffirmation of the sharp differences between the urban and the rural voter. The levels of participation of rural voters in Karnataka’s polling have once again been far greater than that...
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