-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The Panchayati Raj ministry, created by the UPA government to drive Rajiv Gandhi's idea of empowering gram sabhas, is struggling to remain relevant under the Narendra Modi regime. Finance minister Arun Jaitley, in his budget presentation, slashed the Panchayati Raj ministry's plan outlay to a meagre Rs 94 crore in 2015-16 from Rs 7,000 crore this fiscal, and transferred its flagship schemes - the Backward Regions Grants...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Comptroller and Auditor General Shashi Kant Sharma on Tuesday emphasized on the need for mandatory social audit of social sector schemes as they lacked transparency and accountability. Speaking at a conference on social audit here, the CAG said expenditure of central and state governments that directly impacts socio-economic development was estimated to be Rs 17 lakh crore in 2013-2014. "This implies that an average of Rs 2,656...

-The Indian Express The Bharat Krishak Samaj (BSK) has long urged the merger of the agriculture ministry with the water resources and rural development ministries, in the interests of better coordination. With cooperative federalism gaining currency as an idea, that might just become possible. Now, the Panchayati Raj and food processing ministries could join the club, leaving agriculture, for all practical purposes, to the states, as envisaged by the Constitution. But...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Eight central schemes have been left to states following the Centre's decision to raise their share of federal taxes, but this has left the Union Panchayati Raj ministry almost jobless. The schemes de-linked from central support are: Backward Regions Grant Funds (BRGF) of the Panchayati Raj ministry; Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Sashaktikaran Abhiyaan (RGPSA) of the Panchayati Raj ministry; E-governance...

Quite opposite to the top-down model of budgeting, the newly elected Aam Aadmi Party-led Government in Delhi has decided to go for a 'citizen-centric' budget planning at 'mohalla'-level for the fiscal year 2015-16. Drawing lessons from the success stories of participatory budgeting conducted at municipal-level in cities like Porto Alegre (Brazil), the AAP-led Delhi Government has decided to launch this form of decentralized budgeting on a pilot basis in a...