-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...

-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,...

-The Indian Express In a damning criticism of the UPA government's flagship rural job guarantee scheme, the Rural Development Ministry has said the scheme was reduced to "yet another government programme exploited for pure partisan purpose" and through which "participating agencies and individuals" seek "personal benefit". An internal note prepared by the office of the Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari has claimed MGNREGA has "earned quite a bad name" due to a...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Union rural development ministry today highlighted the findings of select studies to defend its plan to modify the rural job guarantee scheme and answer critics who have accused it of trying to dilute the programme. A ministry note that cited these studies said the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) needed reforms to increase the creation of productive and durable assets and reduce politics and...

-Deccan Chronicle Under the stewardship of Union rural development minister Nitin Gadkari, things are looking far from good for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the 2005 law passed with cross-party support under UPA-1 that came to be hailed as the world's largest rural job guarantee scheme although, at home, some fair criticisms were also levelled at the way the project worked on the ground. The critics pointed to...