-Livemint.com Fresh fund infusion means the overall budget allocation for MGNREGS in 2016-17 will be Rs43,500 crore New Delhi: The Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government has increased the budget for the national rural employment guarantee scheme by Rs.5,000 crore to Rs.43,500 crore for 2016-17, minister of state for rural development Ram Kripal Yadav told Parliament on Monday. The scheme “will not be shut down but strengthened. It is a special direction...

-The Hindu Business Line The PMUY scheme, under which the poor get subsidised LPG connection, addresses an urgent need. At the same time, it can turn out to be a political masterstroke for the BJP, write Richa Mishra and Debabrata Das The kitchen has always played an important role in Indian politics. Leaders across political parties have cooked their electoral fortunes with the kitchen as the integral ingredient. While some distributed highly...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com New Delhi: The 100-day Accountability Yatra across Rajasthan led by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) has had an impact. The state government has issued orders to re-verify all one million pensions that had been stopped, including the 688,875 pensions that had been cancelled. From December 2015 to March this year the yatra had travelled to 33 districts in Rajasthan to assess how government schemes were functioning, find out people’s grievances...

-Frontline A noteworthy study that provides much-needed insights into the nature and severity of the farm crisis in Punjab. There have been many studies on agrarian distress and farmer suicides in different parts of India in the last decade, including in Punjab. Most of the studies focus on a profile of the victims, mostly landowning farmers, and reasons thereof, with a sample of such farmers. In this context, this book makes a...

-The Hindu India must convert its young population to a competitive advantage, and nutrition and health are foundational to that outcome. The “Global Nutrition Report 2016” once again demonstrates India’s slow overall progress in addressing chronic malnutrition, manifest in stunting (low weight for age), wasting (low weight for height), micronutrient deficiencies and over-weight. Our track record in reducing the proportion of undernourished children over the past decade has been modest at best,...