NABARD Grade A Current Affairs — 29 August 2026

Launched in August 2021, the e-Shram portal completed five years as India's first centralised national database for unorganised workers. It has registered over 300 million workers, assigning each a 12-digit Universal Account Number linked to Aadhaar. The portal is administered by the Ministry of Labour and Employment and enables portability of social security benefits. Workers registered automatically receive ₹2 lakh accidental insurance cover under PM Suraksha Bima Yojana, making it a critical financial inclusion instrument for India's informal labour force.

India's unorganised sector employs roughly 90% of its workforce, yet historically these workers lacked any verifiable identity for welfare delivery. e-Shram addresses this structural gap by creating a single, Aadhaar-seeded registry that cuts across occupational categories — construction workers, agricultural labourers, domestic workers, street vendors, and gig workers alike.

The portal's core mechanism is the Universal Account Number (UAN), a 12-digit identifier that travels with the worker across states and jobs — a portability feature modelled loosely on the EPF UAN for organised sector employees. This portability is the key policy innovation: it allows DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) of scheme benefits to reach migrant workers regardless of where they are working at a given moment.

The embedded insurance linkage is equally significant. Registration automatically triggers coverage under PM Suraksha Bima Yojana, providing ₹2 lakh accidental death and full disability cover and ₹1 lakh for partial disability, with the premium subsidised by the government. This is a convergence model — one registration, multiple scheme benefits — that UPSC examiners test under governance efficiency frameworks.

For RBI and NABARD aspirants, the financial inclusion angle is primary: e-Shram is the demand-side infrastructure that makes last-mile banking and credit delivery to informal workers viable. Without a verified identity and income proxy, banks cannot extend PSL credit or Jan Dhan-linked products to this segment. The portal essentially converts invisible labour into documented economic participants.

India restored 21.76 million hectares of degraded land between 2011 and 2020, generating 1.22 billion person-days of employment, according to a PIB release citing progress under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. This positions India among leading nations on land degradation neutrality. The restoration effort links directly to India's NDC target of restoring 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, contributing to carbon sequestration and rural livelihoods simultaneously.

Land degradation neutrality (LDN) is the principle that the amount of healthy, productive land remains stable or increases over time — losses in one area are offset by restoration elsewhere. It sits at the heart of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), to which India is a signatory. India's commitment under its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) is to restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, as part of a broader goal to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5–3 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent through forests and trees.

The 21.76 million hectares restored during 2011–2020 represents substantial progress toward that 26 mn ha target. The key mechanism is the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), along with MGNREGS, which provides the labour backbone — explaining the 1.22 billion person-days figure. This dual dividend (ecological restoration + rural employment) is central to India's green growth argument.

For UPSC aspirants, the examiner typically tests whether you can connect specific numbers to the convention (UNCCD), the NDC target, and the domestic implementation scheme. For NABARD aspirants, the focus falls on watershed management as a credit-linked rural development tool — NABARD funds watershed projects through its Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) and Watershed Development Fund (WDF). The convergence of land restoration with livelihood generation is precisely what India's LDN strategy is designed to demonstrate internationally.

The Ken-Betwa Link Project, India's first inter-river linking initiative under the National Perspective Plan, has entered active construction. It transfers surplus water from the Ken river in Madhya Pradesh to the water-scarce Betwa basin, benefiting both Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The project includes the Daudhan Dam, a 221-km link canal, and hydropower generation capacity of 103 MW. It aims to irrigate 10.62 lakh hectares and provide drinking water to about 62 lakh people across Bundelkhand.

The Ken-Betwa Link Project (KBLP) is the flagship implementation of India's National River Linking Project (NRLP), conceived under the National Water Development Agency (NWDA). The NRLP envisions 30 river links — 16 peninsular and 14 Himalayan — to transfer water from surplus basins to deficit ones.

Both Ken and Betwa are tributaries of the Yamuna River. The Ken originates in Madhya Pradesh's Jabalpur district and flows northward before joining the Yamuna near Chilla in Uttar Pradesh. The Betwa originates near Bhopal and also joins the Yamuna at Hamirpur (UP). The Bundelkhand region, straddling MP and UP, suffers chronic drought and agrarian distress, making this link hydrologically and politically significant.

The Daudhan Dam, the project's centrepiece, is located in Panna district of Madhya Pradesh and sits adjacent to the Panna Tiger Reserve — a key environmental controversy that delayed the project for years. The Supreme Court granted conditional forest clearance in 2023.

The project cost is approximately ₹44,605 crore (as revised), with the Centre funding 90% and the two states contributing 5% each. The National Ken-Betwa Link Project Authority (NKBLA) was constituted to oversee implementation. The MoU between MP and UP was signed in 2021 under the Union Jal Shakti Ministry. This project is a template for future river-linking efforts and tests the examiner's grip on basin geography, inter-state water sharing, and India's water governance architecture.