The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides 'sustainable livelihoods' or 'green jobs' to workers engaged in restoring the rural ecology while contributing to 'sustainable rural development'. While the works constructed under NREGA possess tremendous potential to improve environmental indicators-rise in water levels, carbon dioxide sequestration, improvement in soil quality etc., it is unclear how much of that is actually happening. This study seeks to explore this question in this context. Firstly, the study finds that, on the whole, MGNREGA works are green and the works do ensure an overall improvement in environmental parameters. Secondly, several newly adopted activities (such as the construction of roads, buildings and wells) are actually not 'environmental' and hence, do not necessarily provide 'green jobs'. Despite the massive socio-economic contribution of these works, they can actually cause significant environmental damage. Therefore, it becomes important to balance the 'non-environmental' works with sufficient 'environmental' works. Finally, though this paper attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of MGNREGA works, it is limited by constraints of data availability, time and resources. However, it intends to push for a national effort to develop methodologies for inculcating environmental

Recent laws for privatizing agricultural produce markets in India are just one prominent example of long-running efforts to liberalize agriculture across South Asia. These legacies of state withdrawal from agriculture and the growing role of private intermediaries in both input and output markets have precipitated simultaneous crises of reproduction and accumulation in the countryside. However, such trajectories of liberalization are both context-specific and politically contested. Drawing from two cases—the Pakistan Kissan Ittehad’s efforts to build a broad political coalition among differentiated agrarian producers to contest the place of farmers in agricultural markets and the Northern Sri Lanka co-operative movement’s autonomous initiatives for post-war rural reconstruction—this article argues that rural movements are providing new and alternative visions for how farmers can engage with liberalizing agricultural markets on more equitable terms.