-Livemint.com MGNREGS work days increased to 150 from 100; Rs.5,142 cr rurban project to create 300 smart village clusters New Delhi: The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government on Wednesday unveiled a package of measures to combat rural distress in the backdrop of a below-average monsoon rainfall. The Union cabinet decided to increase the number of days of employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) from the existing 100...

-Livemint.com The inclusion of digital tools in the lives of NGOs will not only make them a mass producer of digital content, but will also help make the voices of civil society louder Amid all the negativity about the roles and responsibilities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mostly from the government and in many cases the business sector, one fact that nobody can take away from the non-profits is that theirs is...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday stressed the need for a new law to regulate social media to curb malicious and defamatory messages circulated online. Expressing concern over misuse of social media and internet, particularly after the controversial section 66A of the Information Technology Act was scrapped by the Supreme Court, a bench of Justices Dipak Misra and Prafulla C Pant said Parliament should bring a new...

-The Hindu The Attorney General’s argument questioning the right of Indians to privacy is wrong on two counts. But worse, it goes against the interests of the people on every count. The last ten days have spelt dark times for the right to privacy. On one hand, the DNA Profiling Bill, which may result in a database of sensitive personal data with little to prevent its misuse, is being tabled in Parliament....

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...