Madvi Madka owns 4ha of land in Chingavaram in the Sukum block in central India. The district in which the block is located has become infamous after 6 April, killing of 76 policemen by the Maoists. This is the ground zero of the war between the Indian state and the Maoists, and Madka, who owns 4ha of land—often left fallow because there wasn’t enough water for irrigation—here used to make...

Tamil Nadu's success in implementing the NREGA shows its commitment to social welfare, and the way ahead for other states. The share of women in the NREGA workforce has remained high from the beginning and is the highest in the country The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), enacted in 2005, has had a varied record so far. In many states, implementation has been lame (e.g. Bihar and Gujarat) or...

If recent indicators are anything to go by – the failure to keep food prices down, the proposed national food security Act, the failure to ensure even minimum wages to construction workers at projects for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, to recount a few – it seems the country has given up even the pretence of caring about its children or their crippling, unbudging state of malnutrition. Leaders,...

Despite tall claims, the NREGA programme is just a dud as most other “in the name of the poor” expenditures - and as much of a dud as predicted by Rajiv Gandhi A decade or so ago, Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy claimed that the building of dams in India had displaced more than 50 million people. This implied that one out of every three rural Indians had had to move...

In a big embarrassment to the Centre and Delhi government ahead of the Commonwealth Games, a committee appointed by the Delhi High Court has said that workers at Games-related construction sites were not being paid minimum wages and were being made to work overtime for no extra money. The four-member committee was set up to inquire into allegations levelled in a PIL which said conditions of workers at construction sites...