-PTI The financial inclusion drive has resulted in proliferation of bank accounts in rural areas with 88.1 per cent of households having savings accounts, said a survey by Nabard. Incidence of Indebtedness (IOI), which is a proportion of households having outstanding debt on the date of the survey, was 52.5 per cent and 42.8 per cent for agricultural and non-agricultural households, respectively. All India IOI taking rural households together stood at 47.4 per...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: The income of agricultural households, which account for nearly half the rural households in the country, surged to Rs 1,07,172 in 2015-16 at a annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of 12 per cent since 2012-13. According to a rural survey carried out by the National Bank for Agricultural & Rural Development (Nabard), while the average annual income levels of non-agricultural households in 2015-16 stood at Rs...

-ThePrint.in Manual scavenging is a reality and Dalit women, particularly, will be forced to shoulder the burden of cleaning dry pits. Prime Minister Narendra Modi frequently tweets appreciation for on-ground workers of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA). One such widely shared post was an image of the secretary in the ministry of drinking water and sanitation, Parameswaran Iyer, going down a double-pit toilet in a rural home and cleaning it. He was lauded...

-Livemint.com Rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha on how MGNREGS has evolved since 2006 to result in income, acreage, water tables, productivity and fodder availability Agrarian distress and rural distress are terms used interchangeably, but the rural economy today is very different from what it was many years ago, given the diversification of rural incomes and hence incorrect to think one means the other, says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, ministry of rural development. In...

Good news about digital inclusion often leaves little room for reporting on bad experiences, which netizens encounter in the digital world. A recent report by LIRNEAsia – an ICT [information and communication technology] policy and regulation think tank working in the Asia-Pacific – says that almost one among five Indian netizens in the age-group 15-65 years had faced online harassment in 2017. In contrast, roughly twelve out of hundred internet...