-Oxfam Blog Vanita Suneja, Oxfam India's Economic Justice Lead, argues that India can't progress until it tackles rural poverty. This entry was posted on 3 February 2015. More than 800 million of India's 1.25 billion people live in the countryside. One quarter of rural India's population is below the official poverty line - 216 million people. A search for economic justice for a population of this magnitude is never going to be...

-DNA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly knowns as NREGA, is the most romantic and largest development project in human history. It is extremely popular and invited widespread hatred. It embodies remarkable scope for alienated people and effortless corruption for powerful people at the lower level. The amount spent on it over the last nine years is about Rs3.50 lakh crore. The average number of jobs generated per year...

-The Indian Express ONE of the late R.K. Laxman's best cartoons from the mid-1960's portrays a smiling food minister looking out of a window at a heavy monsoon downpour saying, "This year we can tell the Americans to go to hell." Fifty years ago, a good monsoon meant that that year, India was not dependent on food aid and wouldn't have to go hat in hand to the Americans for food...

-The Indian Express I recently witnessed protests in Berlin, against industrialised farming and the planned free-trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, under the banner "We Are Fed Up". Trade issues resonate across Europe, but in India, farmers are oblivious to the inevitable consequences of trade agreements. However, the government seems keen to address issues related to farmers. Yet, success on the farm front can be delusional if...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The performance of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Rajasthan was debated for its stupendous performance in the initial years of the scheme, but also for the relative sharp decline after 2010. Based on a large representative primary survey, this paper argues that the decline in performance of this scheme in Rajasthan is not entirely due to the lack of demand. Instead, the supply-driven top-down nature of...