PRADAN

As the Covid-19 pandemic was leaving deep scars around the globe, it forced governments to take measures to protect citizens and ensure food security for its people. In India, initially, it looked as if the remote rural areas would skirt the pandemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared coronavirus disease a pandemic. Originating from Wuhan in China, it has traversed almost the entire globe, and claimed more than 41,000 lives, while over 8 lakh people are infected already. That’s largely the urban population.

A civil society consultation was held on “Regenerating natural resources and rural livelihoods in rainfed areas of India” by WASSAN at Hyderabad in December 2010 to discuss priorities for the twelfth five year plan. The Planning Commission, Government of India has been steering the process of development in India by conceptualizing five year plans and had sought inputs from civil society organizations, activists groups, networks of CBOs / NGOs, donors and others for preparing an approach paper for twelfth plan.

The objective of the consultation workshop was to contribute to the process of defining broad contours of twelfth plan with a focus on rural livelihoods the thrust area being policy framework, funding support, institutional arrangements etc., by -

• Consolidating the lessons from good practices in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods in the country, that could be integrated in twelfth five year plan.
• Systematically articulating issues and concerns (bottlenecks) in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods, which could be addressed in the twelfth five year plan.