-Oxfam India Oxfam India launches food justice bulletin along with the Institute of development Studies (IDS), calls for assessing government's commitment to hunger Despite enormous growth in economic and political power, 46 per cent of Indian children are malnourished, and 1 in 3 of the world’s hungry live in India. Yet India stands on the threshold of potentially the largest step toward food justice the world has ever seen, as the National...

-The Hindu Asara leaders say the media has not reported all decisions such as ban on dowry & compulsory schooling The leaders of the Samaj Sudhar Sabha in Asara village here, who recently ordered women to stop using mobile phones, have claimed that they had never imposed any “blanket ban” and only restrained them from using mobile phones while stepping out of their homes. However, the Sabha members did not backtrack on...

Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...

With the threat of a failed monsoon and an impending drought, the need for public works and for greater numbers of workers will arise in many states, says National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy Despite all its seminal achievements, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act is at the receiving end of the most controversial critiques any government programme has received so far. We could perhaps invert this to say...

-The Business Standard   MGNREGA review should be based on more research Both acclaim and accusations have been hurled at the UPA’s landmark scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, or MGNREGA. Usually, the reasons for the criticism or praise are less-than-completely supported. For example, it has been both praised and condemned for providing local wage employment to the jobless, thus curbing outmigration; similarly, it is claimed that the scheme has...