-Livemint.com With global population set to hit 11 bn by 2100, gene banks are vital links in a chain of steps needed to avert hunger New Delhi: From the outside, the tapering building in classic brick red and cream standing by a quiet stretch of road in west Delhi has the unmistakable look of a government office block, an impression reinforced by its manicured lawns and the acronym NBPGR embossed at...

-The Hindu The GARV app puts pressure on State governments for timely and quality delivery “I am going to turn everything into an app and I am going to allow people to monitor daily what work we are doing, what work States are doing” — Piyush Goyal, March 23, 2016 at the Power Focus Summit Rural electrification has been an enduring challenge for successive governments. Given India’s federal structure, States provide last-mile connectivity...

-The Hindu The Centre claims to be fulfilling the Prime Minister’s plan for full rural electrification. But a close check of its own real-time data shows that the gap between official claims and ground reality is stark Haldu Khata, a village in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh, is one of the 7,008 villages that the government claims to have “electrified” in the last year, under the Modi government’s flagship scheme of rural...

  Social audit is an important tool not just to ensure transparency and accountability in the MGNREGS, but also for successful running of the programme. The MIS (Management Information System) data provided by the website www.nrega.nic.in reveals that at the national-level roughly one-third of all districts were covered under social audit during the financial year 2015-16, as on 26 March, 2016. The top 5 states during 2015-16 (FY) in terms of the...

-Livemint.com Only Chhattisgarh and odisha have shown extraordinary success in making public distribution system work efficiently and equitably Across thousands of schools in India, expensive computers, printers and scanners are gathering dust. In many panchayats and other local bodies, such hardwares remain unused. Meanwhile, tonnes of government orders and circulars continue to be scanned and uploaded on official websites, which serve absolutely no purpose to anyone. Computerization, digitization and automation are often seen...