An evaluation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in the State has found several shortcomings in the implementation including corruption, inefficiency and lack of awareness about the programme. The draft of the evaluation, conducted by two researchers of the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) has found that while the rules stipulate that each worker entitled to get 100 days of employment under the scheme should have...

India's rural innovators have proved that ordinary people are indeed capable of extraordinary inventions. Despite many constraints -- lack of education and severe cash crunch -- most of them have succeeded in using technology cost-effectively to build ingenious products. A washing-cum-exercise machine, hand operated water lifting device, portable smokeless stove, automatic food making machine, solar mosquito killer, shock proof converter, a floating toilet soap are few of the products on display...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...

There is a fundamental inequality in the governance arrangement in New Delhi that continues to plague the United Progressive Alliance. Members of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council feel they have the right to criticise the government and its functionaries all the time, while no one in government is willing to return the compliment. In an interview to this newspaper, (March 13) the self-proclaimed father of India’s green...

A number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Greenpeace, on Wednesday lashed out at the Pranab Mukherjee-headed Group of Ministers (GoM) on coal mining for working in an “undemocratic manner” and sought greater transparency and openness in its functioning. “We are demanding that the process be opened up and made transparent. There has to be proper consultation with the stakeholders and issue experts,” Ashish Fernandes of Greenpeace India said in a statement...