The issue is not monitoring, but the administrative structure itself, at the district and village levels The Planning Commission has recently put out the results of an evaluation conducted by it on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), after a survey of 20 districts. This is the most comprehensive official evaluation so far, and it makes interesting reading, not just in terms of the performance of the scheme, but...

With shift to a high-input cash cropping system, the debt process bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘catastrophe’ If it does not rain over the next week, farmers of Petlawad tehsil and its neighbouring regions in Jhabua might have to go the same way as their brethren in Vidarbha did. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan recently declared Jhabua, along with 36 other districts, drought-hit. The agricultural apparatus in...

THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...

They contest Planning Commission’s poverty estimates  Food Bill exercise calls for detailed discussion and exclusive meeting: States Transfer of food subsidy in cash to BPL families won’t serve the purpose: Maharashtra The Centre has asked the States to put a cap on the number of Below Poverty Line (BPL) beneficiaries under the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) for purposes of theproposed National Food Security Bill. It also wants the BPL...

It's official. Even as Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy admitted there had been 20 suicides by farmers in the state in the last 40 days, yet another case came to light on Saturday. Peddolla Nadipi Bhumanna hanged himself at home in Donchanda village of Morthad mandal late on Friday night. It’s learnt that the 55-year-old farmer, faced with crop failure, was driven to desperation because he was...