What is good governance? How well can a person or a community access help or push for a needed change? How often are they heard? Village Square shines a light on the people and schemes making the biggest impact or providing the most unique solutions.
Governance
Ujjwala and waterwheels: reducing women’s drudgery
Regular supply of cooking gas and easier ways to bring drinking water home would significantly reduce the daily drudgery of women in rural areas
Vagad farmers stage progress marches
Tribal farmers of the Vagad region have been marching through villages to find local solutions to farming and community problems through participation and discussion
Social audit empowers Odisha’s rural poor
People left out of the government’s welfare programs have been included through a social audit in Odisha’s underdeveloped rural areas, boosting nutrition security among impoverished families
Villagers face eviction near Panna forest reserve
The residents of Rampura, a small village in the buffer zone of the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, have been asked to move. But, they say, with no allocation of alternative land, they have nowhere to go
Is farmer income support a sustainable solution?
Income support to smallholder farmers is similar to palliative measures like minimum support prices or loan waivers that do not address the problem of an unsustainable population living on a fixed resource base
Rural India still insensitive to persons with disabilities
In a society steeped in referring people with special needs by their disability, there is a need for concerted efforts to recognize their rights and create inclusivity
Village women up in arms against alcoholism
Women in rural Karnataka have banded together to demand a prohibition on liquor because they are the receiving end of alcoholism of men that leads invariably to domestic violence and financial hardship
The travails of India’s forest dwellers
Tribal people who live in and around forests are being continuously pushed beyond the edge of their meager livelihoods and the land where they live, despite laws that are supposed to protect their rights
Is resettling millions of forest dwellers feasible?
A recent Supreme Court order that will likely lead to the largest ever eviction of forest dwellers in India needs to be seen as a wake-up call for state governments to quickly remedy the situation