-GRIST Media If hard work and enterprise inevitably made you prosperous, every rural woman would be a millionaire. These women have borne the brunt of the radical, often brutal transformation of rural India these past two decades. Our writers examine the hardships they continue to face as well as their remarkable vision to solve some of the greatest problems of our times such as food security, environmental justice and developing a...

-The Times of India MUZAFFARPUR (Bihar): The Union government has started dumping MGNREGA by restricting the expenditure on wages and also limiting the area where this central project is being implemented in the country, said RJD national vice-president and former Union minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh here on Sunday, who had launched the project in February 2006 during his tenure as Union minister for rural development in the UPA regime. Talking to the...

-The Indian Express Year after year, Pratham's Annual Survey of Education Report, or ASER, tells us about children who go to school but can't read or do basic math. This year, as ASER volunteers fan out across 570 Rural Districts, Uma Vishnu visits a village in Rampur, a district in UP with some of the worst learning levels in the country, to see what it is to read. Aao, padho." Kusum,...

-FirstPost.com What compelled a group of leading economists from India and abroad to shoot a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi regarding the government's job scheme - the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or NREGA? Is it to speak out against the government's desperation to throttle the scheme or did the economists sense any ulterior motive behind the government's move? A section of prominent Indian economists working out of the country or...

-The Indian Express We want Prime Minister Narendra Modi to succeed in his national campaign to tackle the vast problems of the poor in Bharat. But his one-time contractor turned Union minister for rural development is succeeding in making his own prime minister look contradictory and indecisive to the nation and the world. The prime minister talks about constructing toilets and improving sanitation, opening bank accounts for every poor, excluded family,...