What are the poor most concerned about? After meeting families in 175 Indian villages in the last decade, Anirudh Krishna, says the poor's greatest worry is their children's future. With a manner of a school teacher, Professor Krishna, who teaches at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in the US, has led a team meeting poor families to find out why poverty persists. The research also includes...

Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

Eleven women sarpanchs figure in the list of the 48 accused in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) fund scam in Gujarat’s Dahod taluka. Authorities, however, pointed out that the real culprits could be their husbands running the show by proxy on these reserved seats. Fatehsinh Pargi, a resident of Moti Shehra village in Fatehpura taluka, who brought the issue of non-payment of wages and manipulation of job...

One of the most intriguing features of India's agrarian economy in recent years is the persistence of agrarian distress in many regions, even while agricultural credit flow has risen sharply. Rising flow of credit to agriculture is normally associated with buoyancy in the farm sector. A closer look at the data on agricultural credit reveals that what is termed agricultural credit may have very little to do with agriculture, the...

Nearly 1200-1500 farmers from across Punjab, under the banner of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Rajewal), on Tuesday began their indefinite protest on the Mohali-Chandigarh border after they were denied entry to Chandigarh. They sat on the road leading from Sector 43-44 in Chandigarh towards Phase VIII in Mohali But a large contingent of police, from both Chandigarh and Mohali, had since early morning closed the road even for regular traffic. The...