-Scroll.in Instead of wages for a short period of time, the family running the project in Lanka village will create an asset for life. Mahavir Parhaiya’s household in the remote village of Lanka in Latehar district of Jharkhand is bustling with activity. They are busy working on setting up a mango plantation on what was once a barren plot near their house, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-HuffingtonPost.com A safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable populations. Recently there has been a lot of debate in academic and policy circles about mainstreaming climate concerns in development programs in order to build the resilience of vulnerable communities. One such development initiative is the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), whose main objective is to reduce rural poverty by providing a legal guarantee of 100 days' paid labour...

-Scroll.in Suranga is a horizontal tunnel-like well excavated in a hillside. Even as Kerala reels under severe drought, Gangadhar Rao never misses a day to irrigate thousands of areca nut trees, coconut trees and pepper plants on his 30 acres of farmland. Rao is a farmer from Bedadka Panchayath in Kerala’s northernmost district of Kasaragod and depends on Suranga for all his water needs — irrigation and domestic — round the year. Suranga is...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Activists and researchers today accused the Centre of systematically curtailing the 100-day rural job scheme by not releasing funds for the payment of beneficiaries, diluting norms to avoid giving compensation and cancelling cards of genuine job-seekers. They said payments to around 10 crore poor workers were getting delayed because of the lack of funds. The Union rural development ministry denied the charges. At a news conference, Nikhil Dey of the...

-TheWire.in Community managed rice banks have replaced defunct government managed rice banks in several areas of Patna district in Bihar. A few years ago, Parbhawati Devi, Bichiya Devi and Meena Devi were landless farm laborers, fully at the mercy of landed farmers for their survival. But things have changed since then. Today, hundreds of women in dozens of villages in Patna district of Bihar, mostly from the marginalised Mahadalit community, have turned...