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
Income support is healthy tonic for smallholder farmers
Instead of farm loan waivers and minimum support price for crops that distort resource allocation and markets, basic income support to small and marginal farmers is a far better state mechanism
Heavy snow hurts Kashmir’s apple farmers
Extreme weather events such as untimely snowfall and heavy floods have harmed the apple crop in Kashmir; one way to reduce losses is to properly implement a crop insurance scheme
Participation key to empowering Juang tribes
Treating Juang tribes of Odisha as participants in the development process rather than as recipients of development largesse will help bringing them into the national mainstream
Can data-driven social enterprises boost farmer incomes?
A collaboration between technological and value chain enterprises working directly with farmers could help make the farm to fork value chain more organized and efficient, thus increasing returns to cultivators
Mayurbhanj villagers forced to ford river to reach schools, hospitals
Inadequate and inconvenient road connectivity due to poor planning compels many villagers in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha to risk a dangerous crossing of Burhabalang River everyday to reach the nearest town
The unending saga of farm distress in India
Farmers in India will continue to suffer unless there is a fundamental change in the pro-urban policy bias of propping up unsustainably low food prices
Temple carvers unite against scourge of silicosis
Three out of every 10 stone-carving workers in Rajasthan, who build temples, are facing death due to silicosis. They are now unionizing to demand freedom from disease and for dignity in god’s work
Community radio creates waves of change in Karnataka villages
Run primarily by women, the Sarathi Jhalak radio station has brought administrators, experts and villagers on the same platform, giving rural communities a voice
Unsafe behavior rampant in the countryside
Whether it is a national trait or simply a rural folly, there is a need to examine the cavalier neglect of basic safety rules that pervades life in villages across the country