-The Indian Express The MGNREGA promises 100 days of employment every year to each rural household. The Act mandates that at least a third of the workers under the scheme should be women. The flagship rural job guarantee scheme may have succeeded in ensuring that a significant proportion of its workforce comprises of women, but it has failed to bridge the gender gap and include women in a holistic way, a...

-Hindustan Times U-turns on net neutrality, porn ban and now the draft encryption policy. This is the third time in as many months that the Centre has had to take a step back in the face of a strong public outcry against ‘draft policies’ relating to technology and the digital consumer. For a government that is committed to a Digital India and transformative powers of technology, the series of missteps point to...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: VIP districts getting 24X7 power supply in Uttar Pradesh are also among PLAces with maximum power theft. And two districts on top of this dubious list are Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Varanasi and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's Azamgarh constituencies. In fact, both have seen a huge jump in line losses. In Varanasi, the line loss has gone up from 43.18% to 50.13% while in Azamagarh, it...

-Business Standard India’s growth in agriculture and allied activities has struggled to reach the targeted four per cent average a year in the first three years of the 12th five-year PLAn because of a host of factors. The below-average farm growth is widely expected to deepen the crisis in the farm sector. In an interview with Sanjeeb Mukherjee, newly-appointed member of NITI Aayog and eminent agriculture economist Ramesh Chand  said over-reliance...

-The Hindu Our work involves a lot of travel, including for various committees in Delhi’ India paid Rs.176 crore to its 543 Lok Sabha members in salaries and expenses over the last year, or just over Rs. 2.7 lakh a month per Member of Parliament (MP), new official data show. MPs are entitled to Rs.50,000 per month as salary, Rs.45,000 as constituency allowance, Rs.15,000 as office expenses and Rs.30,000 for secretarial assistance. When...