After deliberating for well over seven months, the Union government has eventually evolved a scheme to extend the scope of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) on individual land holdings with Rs. 1.5 lakh as the upper limit of expenditure. The Rural Development Ministry has prepared a draft guideline, detailing not only the works that could be taken up for implementation but also the conditions to govern the...

The state government is contemplating building multiplexes in some selected gram panchayats to make urban entertainment available to the rural populace. Provisions starting from video parlours to indoor games, community halls and auditoriums will be available in these rural multiplexes. Besides, there will be at least 40 shops in each of the rural multiplex, which will be built on public-private partnership (PPP) mode. The proposal was discussed at a meeting chaired by...

The strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers. Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor or to estimate the number of dead lying among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people. International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally told the...

A section of the media seems to be mighty impressed with Bihar’s miraculous (11.03%) average annual growth during the 2004-05 to 2008-09, supposedly akin to that of Gujarat (11.05%) but is there a catch in this stunning statistics? (See the graph below). While the media has quoted the Gross State Domestic Product at factor cost (at constant 1999-2000 prices) as provided by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO), but the corresponding...

Kabul (Reuters): Dozens of Indian labourers have been forced to take refuge in a Sikh temple in Kabul after job agents who promised lucrative jobs in the unstable capital disappeared, leaving the men penniless and without passports. Billions of dollars in western military contracts have turned Afghanistan — long a source of refugees fleeing chronic conflict — into an unlikely magnet for migrant workers willing to risk their lives for a...