-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Hindu   An improvement in sanitation and cleanliness will eliminate much of the difference in malnutrition between India and the rest of the world, and across Indian States Historically the greatest advances in longevity and mortality reduction have come not from treatment of individual disease but from public health. This includes modern drainage and sewerage systems (sewage treatment plants), drinking water systems that produce and deliver disease-free water and solid waste disposal...

-The Times of India Blog The presidential address to Parliament on June 9, 2014 had focussed nearly exclusively on projects and schemes, eschewing policy. Therefore, many had eagerly awaited the budget speech for a policy vision of the new government. Unfortunately, it too left observers guessing on whether the government would tackle tough reforms or rely principally on better implementation. Had this been the budget of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), arguably...

-The Hindu The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) on Friday gave the green signal for field trials of genetically modified (GM) rice, mustard, cotton, chickpea and brinjal at its meeting in Delhi. Hem Kumar Pande, chairperson of the GEAC told The Hindu that meetings were not held for a year since March 2013 and there was a backlog of 70 applications pending since 2011-12 of which 60 have been cleared so far. Friday's...

-The Hindustan Times ‘Himalayan Glaciers will disappear by 2035'. This was one the very alarming conclusions of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was brought to my attention when I took over as minister for environment and forests in May 2009. Could this really be true, I wondered. I then decided to convene a series of meetings with experts from different institutions across the country. And what...