Growth in rural wages not only indicates economic prosperity of the masses, it is also considered important so as to generate effective demand for goods and services, which is produced by various sectors of the economy. When money becomes available in the hands of rural workers due to government spending on programmes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), it generates demand for commodities. The production of commodities...

-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...

-The Hindu The farming work is being taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana Thiruvananthapuram: A 13.5-acre ‘padasekharam’ in Plavodu ward of Pulimath grama panchayat that remained fallow for years is being transformed into a paddy field as part of the Kudumbashree District Mission’s fallow less-village activities. Taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana, the organic paddy...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-Financial Express Even as loan waivers are known to help a small number of farmers, Odisha has come up with a farmer-centric scheme which assists farming on a large and secular scale. It comes at a time when a debate on validity of loan waiver is being discussed across the country. KALIA — a farmer-specific scheme launched by the state — includes payments to everyone from big farmers and landless cultivators...