Just reclassified Rs 1.46 lakh crore of spending as capital investment. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget for 2011-12 seems to have used a new accounting system to make a virtue of necessity. Committed to provide funds to run the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or MGNREGS, Mukherjee has transferred the entire financial allocation for the scheme under a head that will now help him take credit for a reduced effective...

Two villages in Uttar Pradesh have reversed the trend of migration by digging six kilometres of channels to bring water to drought-hit farms Call it the fallout of seven years of severe drought or government inaction, a silent revolution is brewing in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh. Communities are getting united and digging channels to bring water from government canals to their fields. Some are volunteering labour, while those belonging to...

If women in rural areas had the same access to land, technology, financial services, education and markets as men, agricultural production could be increased and the number of hungry people reduced by 100-150 million, FAO said today in its 2010-11 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture report. Yields on plots managed by women are lower than those managed by men, the report said. But this is not because women...

The government wants to make its rural jobs guarantee programme more open to scrutiny and empower its beneficiaries by getting panchayats (village councils) to periodically disclose information about the scheme’s functioning in that area. To this end, the ministry of rural development has issued an advisory to village panchayats, making it mandatory for them to convene regular gram sabhas (village general bodies). The initiative is also aimed at making the scheme...

The Union Government’s belated decision to establish an audit mechanism for projects undertaken under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has been motivated by a number of complaints regarding irregularities in the implementation of the programme. The Government should have taken the step much earlier, in fact soon after the scheme was introduced with much fanfare as the ruling United Progressive Alliance’s flagship social sector project. But at...