Journal of Sustainable Development; Vol. 12, No. 4; 2019 ISSN 1913-9063 E-ISSN 1913-9071 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 1 Geospatial Evaluation of Sustainable Development: Analysing a Sample of a Successful Social Safety Net Giribabu Dandabathula 1 , Sudhakar Ch. Reddy 2 , Chandrika Mohapatra 3 & Peddineni V.V Prasada Rao 4 1 Regional Remote Sensing Centre – West, NRSC/ISRO, Jodhpur, India 2 Forestry and Ecology Division, National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO, Hyderabad, India 3 Symbiosis Institute of Geoinformatics, Pune, India 4 Department of Environmental Sciences, Andhra University, Vishakhapatnam, India Correspondence: D. Giribabu, Regional Remote Sensing centre – West, NRSC/ISRO, Sector 9, KBHB, Bypass Road, Jodhpur – 342005, Rajasthan, India. E-mail: dgb.isro@gmail.com Received: May 8, 2019 Accepted: June 3, 2019 Online Published: June 20, 2019 doi:10.5539/jsd.v12n4p1 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/jsd.v12n4p1 Abstract Sustainable Development (SD) not only ensures addressing the root cause of poverty but also helps in achieving the wellness of society. Protecting the natural resources for current and future generations is the main goal of the SD process. In recent times, developing countries have initiated social safety nets (SSNs) for poverty elimination and to achieve the SD goals through public works. The Government of India has initiated numerous development projects aimed to achieve SD and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is one of them. The research objective of this article is to harness the power of geospatial technology for evaluating the public works under MGNREGA at a district level. The proposed research method utilizes the power of remote sensing data with a very high spatial and temporal resolution to monitor the development activities at the grass root level. Satellite based land-use maps, indices, and publicly available web based geospatial information systems have been used in this investigation to assess the changes that have occurred due to the community-level planned activities. The findings from this research confirm that MGNREGA has the potential to accrue multiple dividends at all the three pillars of SD, i.e., economic development, social development, and environmental protection. It was proved from this research that public works under MGNREGA besides providing the wage based employment to the beneficiaries resulted in improved water conservation and harvesting facilities in the study area and in return, these facilities acted as a catalyst for improved agricultural productivity. Keywords: social safety nets, sustainable development, rural employment, rural development, water conservation and harvesting, MGNREGA, India 1. Introduction The best era of human-kind is in progress after the United Nations' intervention to facilitate Sustainable Development (SD) and the unanimous adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 193 countries. SD addresses the root cause of poverty, the needs of the society, and protection of the planet without destroying the resources needed for future generations. The 2030 agenda for SD points out that sustainability has three dimensions: economic, social, and environment (United Nations, 2015). Rockström and Sukhdev (2016) stressed that all SDGs are interrelated and categorized the 17 SDGs into 3 layers viz., the economy, the society, and the environment. Social Safety Nets (SSNs) are extended modules of the Governments’ welfare measures that are gaining significance in today’s quest for SDGs. SSNs will act as drivers of social protection and helps in achieving SDG 1. They can guarantee social justice, inclusiveness, strong democracies, and enables the economies and societies to survive from various kinds of crisis situations like economic shocks, natural disasters, and other unforeseen catastrophes. As of date, every developing country in the world has a SSN program (World Bank, 2017). The impact of society on natural resources can give an indication in assessing the extent of SD (Devuyst, 2000; Singh, Murthy, Gupta, & Dikshit, 2009). Impact on natural resources by society can be monitored by identifying those activities that will interact with ecosystem components. Earth Observation (EO) system gathers the information about the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and their interactions using