-IANS The railway ministry has asked the rural development ministry to bring its projects in far-off and rural areas under the rural job guarantee scheme. "A number of our projects in railways, including regular maintenance, require unskilled labour forces. Most of such works are connected with earthwork, construction and maintenance of embankments, cuttings, trenching, filling, developing water ways and clearing vegetational growth," Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal said in a letter to...

-The Hindu Chennai: The Tamil Nadu experiment of engaging thousands of differently abled persons under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has prompted the Union government to replicate the model in the rest of the country. “We have incorporated the TN model in our national guidelines,” according to Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh. What has impressed the Centre is not only the extent of engaging the differently-abled but...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: While the country celebrates the seventh anniversary of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Bengal continues to be one of the poor performers. The Paschimbanga Khet Majdoor Union alleges that a group of vested interests, "comprising landed farmers, industrialists and a section of the intelligentsia" were working in tandem to subvert the positives of NREGA in the state. The union, which has criticized both the...

-The Hindu MGNREGA records manipulated; workers’ wages siphoned off from accounts Rankikalan (Jharkhand): At noon on Tuesday last, a dozen men gathered on the banks of the Auranga near Rankikalan village in Latehar district. As they performed the dashmirites, the wailing from the huts in the village continued. Bhuiatoli village had lost 23 men, women and children when the truck in which they were returning to the village after working on landlords’...

-Economic and Political Weekly A cost-benefi t analysis by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy of the benefits from Aadhaar integration with seven schemes throws up huge benefi ts that are based almost entirely on unrealistic assumptions. Further, the report does not take into account alternative technologies that could achieve the same or similar savings, possibly at lower cost. Reetika Khera (reetika.khera@gmail.com) is at the Institute of Economic Growth on...