Republic Day is an ideal occasion to celebrate rural India’s positive progress. VillageSquare recollects how communities used the lockdown productively, despite difficulties and loss of livelihoods.
In Jharkhand’s remote villages where opium has been cultivated illegally for many years, forest department promotes American saffron as an alternative crop of commercial value
In a remote village in Majuli island, women who have always woven their traditional garments, are using their weaving skills to make different products and earn more
Lack of transportation and marketing facilities and exploitation by private money lenders have forced cotton growers to cultivate other crops despite cotton’s potential for good returns
Growing a minimum of three crops per season, women farmers overcome climate risks. Staggered harvest from multiple crops help then earn through the year and overcome market risks
Quitting a lucrative job and taking up farming, engineer runs a farm-based enterprise, enabling women farmers to become rural entrepreneurs
Development eluded two remote Irula tribal villages in Western Ghats. Through Tribal Sub-Plan being implemented, they hope to revive agriculture that once kept them self-sufficient
With hard-earned and loan-funded professional and arts degrees, rural youth who lost their jobs during lockdown have taken up MGNREGS work in Bidar
For more than a century, Kerala’s forest-dwelling tribes have been repeatedly evicted for power projects. Faced with another displacement, the tribes refuse to give up their rights
When weaving became unsustainable, two enterprising women started selling idlis to patients and convalescents. Many women followed their footsteps, developing the area into a popular outsource hub
