A series of social audits in NREGS works in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district led to unearthing of humungous irregularities and filing of FIRs against several government and panchayat officials and release of delayed payments worth crores of rupees to the ordinary NREGS workers (See details/ links below). The irregularities included the use of sub-standard material, non-issuance of job cards or post office passbooks and fudging of account books. The audits were organized...

As the 6-year-old son in an upper-class Brahmin family, Bindeshwar Pathak wanted to know what would happen if he touched a scavenger, one of India's "untouchables," stuck at the bottom of the country's social order and fated to collect and dispose of human waste. When he did, his grandmother punished him by forcing him to swallow cow dung and urine, and making him bathe in water from the Ganges. "This...

Here’s a hypothetical, though not altogether unfamiliar, scenario that academic and writer Sunil Khilnani invoked in a lecture at the British Museum to warn against what he called the “paradox of India’s new prosperity.” He asked his audience to imagine two traffic lanes, both at a standstill. After a while traffic in one of the lanes starts moving raising hopes of those stuck in the next lane that they, too,...

We normally assume that malnutrition is a disease of the poorer states, which the richer states are in the process of curing. It now transpires that malnutrition among women and child undernourishment, two essential markers of human development, are rampant in richer states as well. States with high per capita incomes such as Gujarat and Haryana have performed poorly in transforming the growth they have experienced into the well-being of...

A food security law will be meaningful only if it is based on universal food provision and ensures that every citizen’s nutritional needs are met. At an outlet of the public distribution system in Erode, Tamil Nadu. States such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have defined BPL in such an inclusive way that the vast majority of the population is included, which makes their food distribution schemes...