Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi wants an urban job scheme on the lines of the MGNREGS, started in 2006 through legislation and the budgetary allocation for which each year is around Rs 40,000 crore. The proposal, sent by his urban development department, is with the ministry of urban development and poverty alleviation. "We are urbanising very fast and migration to cities is creating a huge employment gap. An NREGA-like programme would...

Weighed down by an unending season of corruption, the political leadership of ruling the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has stepped in to Rescue the regime’s flagship rural employment guarantee scheme from discredit due to mounting allegations of endemic irregularities. The National Advisory Council of the UPA, headed by Sonia Gandhi, on Wednesday asked the Manmohan Singh government to expedite notification of the much-awaited rules that would allow public scrutiny of the...

Even as she said that she would welcome the Tatas setting up a unit at Singur, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said here on Wednesday that the agreement signed between Tata Motors and the previous government for the Nano project would be put in the public domain within a day or two. Briefing the Press after her second Cabinet meeting since assuming office last weekend, she said: “As a reciprocal gesture, I...

It was a warm summer’s morning last week in teeming old Faridabad, a chaotic, industrial town where nearly half the people live in slums. Praveen Kumar was talking to students at a government girls’ senior secondary school. They complained about the broken fans, and they told him how there was just one sweeper to clean the stinky toilet. A lean, graying man with a receding hairline and neatly trimmed moustache, 51-year-old...

A protest by thousands of farmers against alleged forced acquisition of land has spread to parts of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Two policemen and a farmer were killed in weekend clashes, during protests in the Greater Noida region against the acquisition of land by the government for a new motorway. The government denies that the land has been forcibly acquired from farmers. The use of land for industrial purposes is...