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 Addressing a large gathering at Vigyan Bhawan on this occasion in New Delhi, the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh called upon the states to strengthen the Gram Sabhas for rural empowerment. He said the Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Panchayati Raj has jointly chalked out a plan to strengthen the Panchayats. Technical Units will be set up in Gram Panchayats and to improve the managerial efficiency every unit will have a Panchayat Development officer and one Junior Engineer. Focus would be on Left Wing Extremism(LWE) affected districts and the districts where more than Rs.100 crore have been spent under MGNREGA.

 Utility value of world’s freshwater resources like lakes and rivers are diminishing rapidly due to over exploitation & pollution. Groundwater, an alternative to surface water is also a natural victim. The rate of ground water drawing versus its re-charge has already disturbed the natural aquifer equations.

A copy of the revised composition order is enclosed.

Rivers, streams and lakes are the vital link in the water cycle that ensure that life as we know it can continue to flourish on earth. Unfortunately, as Dr Rajendra Singh points out, there is no river in India that has been spared from encroachment and pollution. The massive Ganga Action Plan has failed to clean the Ganges.

Photo credit: cesarharada.com

 Hitherto the role of the government was that of a service provider, with minimum involvement of the community in the planning process and the implementation activities. With the increase in demand due to public aspirations and decrease of availability of safe water it was considered essential to involve the community in the programme.

To achieve this, there was a paradigm shift and the Framework for implementation of National Rural Drinking Water Programme was revised in 2009. The Department appropriately addressed the soft issues related to facilitating the  active participation of PRIs in the process of planning, implementation and operation of schemes to achieve the goal of long term sustainability. It also ensured that the community gets continuous support and handholding so that they are empowered to take up the role of planning and implementing the systems also in addition to operating and maintaining them.

 The Union Minister of Social Justice & Empowerment Shri Mukul Wasnik recently inaugurated the two-day Consultation Meeting on Eradication of Manual Scavenging and Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers.Speaking on the occasion, he called upon the States to work towards eradicating the shameful practice of manual scavenging by the end of the 11th plan. He regretted that despite various efforts made by the Central Government and the States, the practice of manual scavenging still exist in some parts of the country. The meeting was organized by the Ministries of Social Justice & Empowerment, Urban Poverty Alleviation and Urban Development.

Shri Wasnik said that we must address rehabilitation of manual scavengers to our utmost capacity.

During her yearlong stay, Tara trained at least twenty people into video production some of whom have succeeded in finding work in the local market as photographers, cameramen and wedding video makers. In this blog she gives a vivid account of the CVU, its producers and their work.

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.