Resource Type: India Focus Notes

Community engagement initiatives must also consider the socio-cultural backdrop and capacity of the community members. However, to state that all community engagement is positive is taking a rather simplistic view of the multi-faceted problem of rural education.

For a child’s effective education, parents and the community as a whole play a key role. Studies have shown parental engagement improves a child’s achievements. While initiatives like Right to Education Act, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and mid-day meal programme nudge the children to attend school, but the learning outcome also depends on parents’ engagement at home. Read the article for more.

Over the past few years, there was a continuous effort by the government to streamline the in-kind distribution of fertiliser. Targeting fertiliser subsidies directly to farmers would be a herculean task, but can be attempted by combining several initiatives that the central government and some state governments have undertaken over the past years. This note discusses potential solutions to improve in-kind transfers and suggests few ideas for cash transfer pilots for fertiliser subsidy.

The Indian government initiated DBT in fertiliser to plug leakages and bring transparency in the system. Direct Benefit Transfer in Fertiliser (DBT-F) in its current form is a modified subsidy payment system, where the government pays subsidy to fertiliser companies only after fertiliser retailers have sold fertiliser to farmers or buyers. The subsidy isn’t directly credited to farmers in their bank accounts owing to certain challenges. This note highlights the major barriers to distributing fertiliser subsidy through cash transfers and in-kind transfers.

The Government of India has been taking a lot of new initiatives in order to make the processes efficient and error-free. A recent launch of Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP) in August 2008 is one such initiative. Digitised land records will open a lot of new horizons to explore and implement. This focus note discusses few such use cases and the requirements to implement the use cases successfully.

The government of India has been taking a lot of new initiatives in order to make the processes efficient and error-free. The recent launch of Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP) in August 2008 is one such initiative. Digitised land records will open a lot of new horizons to explore and implement.