Building resilience to climate change: MGNREGS, drought and flooding in Odisha

This paper is one in a series of briefings that analyse how the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) builds rural households’ resilience to different climate shocks. This paper examines how MGNREGS is helping households in Mayurbhanj District, Odisha, India, build resilience through convergence with other government departments to help households develop new horticulture livelihoods that strengthen rural livelihoods and improve productivity in the face of drought and flooding.

The goal of the series is to identify options for Indian policymakers to integrate climate risk management into MGNREGS. More broadly, the findings also provide evidence for global policymakers on how to mainstream climate risk management into social protection programmes, or converge and layer social protection and climate risk management instruments to address poverty in the context of climate change.