When a massive sum of public money is spent on a programme like Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA)--a demand-driven programme, there is likelihood of financial misappropriations and mismanagement. Thankfully there are checks and balances in the rural employment guarantee legislation to counter such malpractices. It is worth noting that the total allocation under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA) for 2020-21 was Rs. 1,11,500.00 crore (R.E.), up...

-The Indian Express Policy coordination between the Centre and states will be crucial for implementing this ambitious reform agenda. The National Statistical Office will release the second advance GDP estimates for 2020-21 at the end of February. The first advance estimate had, in early January, forecasted a contraction of 7.7 per cent in 2020-21. This was due largely to an expected, sharp contraction in both industry and services. The second advance estimates...

-The Hindu Many of the Delhi Police personnel deployed at the city borders where farmers are protesting the new agricultural laws are part-time farmers themselves or have fathers who work the fields At the Singhu border protest site, a head constable looks over rows of steel barricades and barriers to lock eyes with his father on the other side. Both stand their ground. The duo may be on opposite sides of the farm...

-NDTV blog If you had invested all your savings in the stock market at the end of March last year, by now, you would have almost doubled your money. But in the same period, India's GDP in today's prices would have slid by at least 9-10 percent. Anyone who looks at this divergence will say that the markets have completely 'decoupled' from the economy. Conventional wisdom tells us that this is a...

-The Telegraph Experiments by SAUrashtra University represent a 'classic example' of a study designed to reach a predetermined conclusion A group of Indian scientists has decried a Union government agency’s invocation of experiments by physicists at Gujarat’s SAUrashtra University to claim cow dung can shield people from radiation. The experiments purportedly showed that cow-dung cakes partially blocked radiation from radioactive caesium. The Rashtriya Kamadhenu Aayog, a unit under the Union fisheries, animal husbandry...