-The Hindu Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey speak about the MKSS experience and their campaign for citizen-centric accountability. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan was founded in Bhim on May 1, 1990 with the aim of organising people at the grassroots. By addressing issues of minimum wage and land and reading out official records, thereby exposing the enormous corruption in the system, it mobilised peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. A dharna held...

-The Hindu The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employee Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) has generated more rural employment than any other government scheme or private initiative in the history of independent India. At the same time, it has also generated a great deal of controversy over its merits and demerits. It would be fair to say that the policy establishment in the country right now is not favourably disposed towards the MGNREGA, with the...

-The Hindu The Modi government is determined to dismantle the two-pronged welfare paradigm. It is now an established fact that one area where the Narendra Modi administration has acted with a sense of purpose, urgency and resolve is in slashing social expenditure. Be it education, health, agriculture, livelihood security, food security, panchayati raj institutions, drinking water or the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plan, central government funds earmarked for social protection have been cut. The...

-The Indian Express Poorly designed policies are largely to blame for farm distress Successive governments have transformed an unevenly prosperous rural society to one which is evenly distressed. Small and marginal farmers now feel worse off than the landless. Most suicides have taken place in the families of such farmers, especially those with no source of non-farm income. For the sense of desperation that now pervades rural India, all political parties are...

-The Indian Express Maharashtra’s horticulturists have had a good run since the 1990s when subsidies under the Employment Guarantee Scheme were offered to small and marginal farmers. Mumbai: There was a time when a farmer’s worries peaked once annually over a failed monsoon or a flood. “Now we get strange weather conditions on one day of every month,” grumbles Kiran Wagh, 35, of Tembhe village in Nashik’s Satana Taluka. “Cloudy, overcast, humid...