Monija Khatun has not got her salary as ad-hoc teacher for 17 months, youth in Soliya village in Jharkhand have got no work under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) for the last five months and half of the newly constructed wells have collapsed in another village. These are just a few stories from a Naxal affected district of Jharkhand, where people feel alienated from the development process, even...

-The Times of India   Union minister of state for planning, science and technology and earth sciences Ashwini Kumar on Saturday expressed his dissatisfaction over the poor implementation of MGNREGA projects in Jharkhand alleging less than half of the households were provided with job cards. Kumar, on a two-day visit to the state, dwelt most part of his interaction with the media here trying to convince people about the "irrelevance" of the social...

-The Business Standard   Worried over allegations of corruption in many government programmes, Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has requested the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to audit all the schemes under his ministry. Ramesh met Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik in the state secretariat today, the last day of his three-day visit to the state. “To maintain transparency, I have requested the CAG to engage special Auditor Generals in each state to...

The Centre is likely to ask states to devote 2% of the funds allocated to them under its flagship rural employment guarantee scheme for providing easy banking services to the rural poor. A funding crisis had hit the government's earlier effort to leverage the banking correspondent, or BC, model for the beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) after banks refused to bear the cost of...

People in Anini are up in arms, seeking clarification from the Block Development Officer-cum-District Project Coordinator regarding the implementation of MGNREGA in Dibang Valley district. It has been alleged that recently some local people, on behalf of the BDO Anini, are going around the district taking signatures on a paper known as the ‘muster roll’ in official parlance. Reportedly, persons employed to get the signatures are not even official employees...