Building resilience to climate change: MGNREGS and climate-induced droughts in Sikkim

This paper examines how the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) helps households in South Sikkim, India, build resilience to winter drought. It is one in a series of briefings that analyse how the scheme builds the resilience of rural households in different states to different climate shocks. The goal of the series is to identify options for Indian policymakers to integrate climate risk management into MGNREGS. But 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 instruments with climate risk management instruments to address poverty in the context of climate change.