A team of officials, led by Assistant Commissioner Prabhuling Kavalikatti, raided a black stone quarry in Vitla in Bantwal taluk and rescued 39 bonded labourers, including some children, on Wednesday. While some of them are from Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu, others belong to Kanakapura near Bangalore. They were given meagre wages and were not allowed to leave the quarry for six years, according to Mr. Kavalikatti. He described it as...
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Indian State Empowers Poor to Fight Corruption by Lydia Polgreen
The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty lungis, were fixed upon him. A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil to rehabilitate farmland. The soil had never arrived, and about $4,000 was missing. The...
More »In Gujarat, e-literate paanwala googles NREGS, stumbles on Rs 1-crore scam
A newly e-literate village paanwala's obsession with Google has blown the lid off a unique NREGS scam in Porbandar. The motley bunch of beneficiaries include affluent NRIs, doctors, government officials, teachers and well-off farmers — all shown as unemployed village labourers holding NREGS job cards. So far, the money siphoned off comes to nearly Rs 1 crore. On paper, there are 963 NREGS job cardholders at Kotda village in Kutiyana taluka...
More »Child labour, still a common practice in large parts of rural India by Bidisha Fouzdar
In a small pastoral vand (hamlet) in Kutch, Gujarat, 10 year old Ramu wakes up at five in the morning. His mother serves him a hasty breakfast of bajra rotis after which he is packed off to the pasturelands surrounding their small hamlet to graze the family's buffaloes. Since his village does not have a working school, grazing the livestock is gainful employment from the point of view of Ramu's...
More »Net-savvy villager reveals $21 Million fraud
Being obsessed with Google, a betel shop owner has exposed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scam in Porbandar where most of the laborers mentioned in the list of beneficiaries were affluent NRIs, doctors in real life, who had never been a part of any job scheme. They have been shown as unemployed village labourers holding NREGA job cards, reports Hiral Dave of the Financial Express. The...
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