-The Business Standard   Study also says MGNREGA workers spent almost 21 minute less in collecting each payment made electronically compared with manual transfer Even as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has put on hold its ambitious unique identification (UID) code-linked cash transfer programme, a study by noted economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar shows that leakage of funds allocated for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)...

-The Business Standard Since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to put on hold the Aadhaar-based subsidy transfer for domestic liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), questions have been raised about the future of one of Congress' most ambitious initiatives aimed at plugging leakages. Two months after the government move, a pioneering study by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar showed leakages dropped 12 per cent when smart cards were...

-The Hindu   Despite having Dhamanguda minor irrigation project, they could not access water from it Adilabad (Andhra Pradesh): Politicians are not the popular lot among the poor Adivasi voters holding the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) job cards in Adilabad district. As they feel that political leaders are responsible for their present pitiable state of utter poverty. "It's been ten years since the Dhamanguda minor irrigation was built, but we...

-The Business Standard The dominant theme in the pre-election discourse is that misrule by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in its second term has led to sharply lower growth of gross domestic product (GDP), which Narendra Modi will reverse, the way he has made Gujarat shine. But the evidence on hand does not support this correlation between the quality of national political leadership and growth performance. If anything, there is...

-Live Mint   Rights laws offer an important lesson for the new government: you cannot legislate your way out of state failure It is well known that the Indian state suffers from a serious crisis of implementation capability. So deep is this crisis that it cannot even reliably perform the most routine tasks like moving money and getting employees to show up at work. So, it is hardly surprising that rights laws have...