We wish members and their families a very happy and prosperous 2008 on behalf of the Community members and your Resource Team.

The year gone by was quite fruitful. We issued thirty-eight consolidated replies during the past year. Members raised extremely interesting queries – which came directly from their field of work. As a result the queries were very well received. Your Resource Team also tried to do justice by formulating useful Consolidated Replies. The queries covered a wide range of issues - from exploring the role of panchayats in ensuring food security, disaster management, spreading health awareness to contributing critical comments on the drafting of roadmaps for strengthening the status of Panchayats in states such as West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala. We look forward to greater engagement with the members in 2008. Your ideas about how to make the Query-Consolidated Reply business more interesting and useful for members are welcome.

The year also saw the organization of face-to-face interactions first during our Regional Forum organized at Thiruvananthapuram in partnership with SDC-CapDeck in June 2007; and then the Annual Forum during 25-27 October 2007 at Bhopal. We have also come out with a CD collection of the consolidated replies (CRs) issued by the Decentralization Community since its inception until the month of September 2007. Two extremely relevant CRs on ‘Food Security for Vulnerable Groups through Panchayats’ and ‘Handbook on Social Audit of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Panchayats’ were published for wider circulation. Of course, these knowledge products are available to the members in the Archives of the community.

The Decentralization Community (and other Solution Exchange sister communities) now have a new website and we encourage you to get acquainted with the various services that this new portal has to offer. We expect that more members will now take part in discussions. We will await your comments on this new service.

Additionally, the Hindi translation service has not taken off to the extent we had hoped it would. If it because of any shortcoming we would like to address it to increase the reach of the Hindi service.

We have issued four Consolidated Replies since the last update and closed four queries during the period. A list of the current queries are below.