A recently released study, which has been done by Dalberg in collaboration with Kantar, and with support from the Omidyar Network India, brings to light both the supply and demand-side perspectives on the 'One Nation One Ration Card' (ONORC) scheme. Titled 'Fulfilling the promise of One Nation One Ration Card: A frontline perspective from 5 Indian states', the survey for the study was conducted in five states i.e., Andhra Pradesh,...

-Down to Earth The arduous journeys of those who migrate for medical treatment in India Marta kya na karta (One can do anything when pushed to the wall),” says 40-year-old Rita Kumari from Supaul district of north Bihar. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was tightening its grip across the country Rita and her daughter, Sandhya, had to undertake multiple trips to hospitals in Nepal and Uttar Pradesh, before reaching the All...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the Manual Workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-IDROnline.org Natural resource management activities under NREGA have the potential to help India increase carbon sequestration and combat climate change. The world’s largest anti-poverty programme may also help India achieve its target of creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent, through additional forest and tree cover, by 2030, in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) captured 102...

-ThePrint.in Women employed as domestic workers in India’s cities have lost work in vast numbers, forcing many to return to their home villages. Lasuben Shivlal Raval is a 70-year-old grandmother from Ahmedabad in India. She has worked as a ‘headloader’ – a goods carrier – in one of the city’s biggest wholesale cloth markets for decades. Her work was always tough, but life became immeasurably harder for Lasuben and her fellow workers...