Tamil Nadu's success in implementing the NREGA shows its commitment to social welfare, and the way ahead for other states. The share of women in the NREGA workforce has remained high from the beginning and is the highest in the country The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), enacted in 2005, has had a varied record so far. In many states, implementation has been lame (e.g. Bihar and Gujarat) or...

The District Administration in Koraput seems to have geared up towards performing remarkably in NREGA in the coming days. Involving credible NGOs, the district is going for social audit of NREGA in the district. Social Audit is an important means of wider transparency in NREGA and the result of the process could provide important directions for better performance in future, Rupa Roshan Sahoo, the project director of DRDA , Koraput said...

Last summer, about 150 families of Kachan village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district decided to pool funds to repair their only community tube well. A drought, the worst in many years, had dried up two Ponds; there were no wells around; and the tube well had been dysfunctional for a year. It took a lot of hardship and one whole month for them to put together what the mechanic had asked...

As the nation debates the National Food Security Act (NFSA) and its implications on food security for the country, it is pertinent to pause for a moment and Ponder some of the structural reasons for the mismanagement of the food economy of the country. Forget the past or the future or even the present set of policies being pursued. The UPA-II is pushing the nation inexorably towards a regime of...

Despite tall claims, the NREGA programme is just a dud as most other “in the name of the poor” expenditures - and as much of a dud as predicted by Rajiv Gandhi A decade or so ago, Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy claimed that the building of dams in India had displaced more than 50 million people. This implied that one out of every three rural Indians had had to move...