Category Center for Human Dignity and Development

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Pradhan Mantri Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (2025): Assessing Convergence-Based Agricultural Reforms

India has developed a large number of agricultural and farmer-welfare schemes covering income support, crop insurance, irrigation, credit, infrastructure, and allied activities. However, their implementation often involves different ministries, departments, and delivery mechanisms, creating coordination challenges at the district level. One such challenge is the absence of a single district-level mechanism to coordinate multiple agricultural schemes and services.

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National Mission on Cultural Mapping (2017): Weaving India’s Heritage into a Digital Tapestry

Jawaharlal Nehru once described India as an ‘ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and experience had been written, with no succeeding layer ever wholly erasing what had gone before.’ The National Mission on Cultural Mapping (NMCM) - a Ministry of Culture initiative launched in 2017 to translate India's artisanal & village-level heritage into a national database - takes this Nehruvian idea as its working premise (Ministry of Culture, 2026a). After nearly a decade of the scheme running and roughly 97 percent of its village target reportedly covered, making it a valuable case study in the sustained & data-driven implementation of a large-scale rural mission.(Ministry of Culture, 2026b).

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Community Health: A Responsive Action for Koylanchal Initiative (CHARAK)

The CHARAK initiative is a targeted corporate social responsibility intervention designed to address specialised healthcare challenges in India’s coal-mining regions. Unlike national health schemes such as Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY which identify beneficiaries primarily through socio-economic deprivation criteria CHARAK covers households with an annual income of up to ₹8 lakh, protecting the vulnerable "missing middle" who often fall outside standard welfare safety nets. Additionally, rather than operating purely as an insurance payout, CHARAK serves as an institutional bridge by using Northern Coalfields Limited’s (NCL) Nehru Shatabdi Chikitsalaya (NSC) to coordinate direct referrals to empanelled super-speciality hospitals nationwide.

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Code on Social Security, 2020: Towards Inclusive Social Security for India’s Workforce

The global labour market has undergone a fundamental transformation since the 2008 global financial crisis. Traditional employment relationships have increasingly given way to flexible platform-mediated forms of work collectively referred to as the gig economy. In India, this transition has been driven by rapid urbanisation, widespread smartphone adoption and the expansion of the digital economy. Gig work refers to income-generating activities performed outside conventional employer-employee relationships. It includes platform-based work facilitated through digital applications such as Swiggy, Zomato and Uber as well as non-platform gig work, including casual wage labour and freelance services.

Mahtari Vandan Yojana, Chhattisgarh (2024): Women’s Welfare through Direct Cash Transfers

Mahtari Vandan Yojana is a women-centred social-protection scheme of the Chhattisgarh government. Launched on 1 March 2024, it provides monthly financial assistance of ₹1,000 to eligible women through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). The official scheme portal states that the programme seeks to promote women’s economic self-reliance, improve health and nutrition, reduce gender-based inequality and strengthen women’s decisive role within the family.

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Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK) (2013): Assessing Child Health Screening and Early Intervention

The Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK) was launched on 6th February 2013, at Palghar in Maharashtra under the National Rural Health Mission, with the aim of identifying health problems in children at an early stage (Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, 2013). Its approach was built around the “4 Ds”:

defects at birth, diseases, deficiencies and developmental delays, including disability, with an initial target of screening more than 27 crore children between 0 and 18 years of age (Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, 2013).

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