-Tehelka Shamefully, in India, a large percentage of the population still defecates in the open. However, a village in Tamil Nadu has scripted a rare success story by becoming an Open Defecation-Free Village. Nisha Ponthathil documents how the people of Amarambedu near Chennai triumphed over habit with a little help from the civil society Twenty-nine-year-old R Karthick, a resident of Amarambedu village, situated about 65 kilometres away from Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai,...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...

-Business Standard States will now have to spend from their pockets to keep their social-sector schemes going The 2015-16 Budget seems to have broken the contract between the Centre and the states on sharing the economic burden for delivering social security. The Centre's assistance to the states for social sector schemes has come down from a budgeted Rs 3.56 lakh crore in FY15 to Rs 2.20 lakh crore in FY16. Effectively, while the...

-Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) Press Release   New Delhi: The direction indicated by the Finance Minister's Budget Speech in general and that of the taxation policies in particular indicate a quantum leap being taken towards market fundamentalism. In the absence of any increase in the overall spending capacity of the government (Centre and States combined), the steps for fiscal decentralization (from Centre to States) have been constrained, implying only...

-Press Information Bureau/ Ministry of Finance The plan outlay of 2015-16 reflects the compositional shift in the allocations for various Programmes and Schemes in view of high devolution; 42% of Union Taxes, to States as per the recommendation of 14th Finance Commission. Making his Budget Speech while presenting the General Budget 2015-16, the Finance Minister, Shri Arun Jaitley said that consequent to this substantially higher devolution, many schemes on the State...