Markabbinahalli Village at a Glance

In the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)- supported Village Dynamics in South Asia (VDSA) Project of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi- Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), 42 villages (18 in the semi-arid tropics (SAT) of peninsular India, 12 in Humid Tropics of East India, and 12 in Bangladesh) were selected, based on certain relevant characteristics, to track rural poverty in household and village economies in the region, to provide the most efficient way to understand the farming systems in rural areas, and to identify the socioeconomic constraints faced by the farming community. In the SAT region, 18 villages spread across 9 districts in 5 states were identified for the study, of which 6 were chosen way back in 1975 under the erstwhile Village Level Studies (VLS) project of the Economics Program of ICRISAT, while 12 new villages were included in the expanded VDSA project during 2009. Markabbinahalli is one of these 12 new village