Video Volunteers, a Goa based chapter of an international community media portal is inviting application for its India Unheard program. It is the second round of program under which selected candidates would be trained to make video reports from their area focusing issues, concerns, actions, innovations, traditions etc related to communities. It’s a one year old endeavor to provide fellowship for citizen journalism.      The Fellowship is open for Hindi speaking...

When noted economist Jean Dreze visited Surguja in Chhattisgarh a decade ago, its utterly non-functional Public Distribution System (PDS) looked like especially “designed to fail.” The National Advisory Committee member has written in a recent article that the ration shop owners illegally sold the grain meant for the poor and “hunger haunted the land.” But that was then. The economist was pleasantly shocked to see the transformation this time. “Ten years...

Nahrani, a 38-year-old in Lalitpur, a village 30km from Jhansi, has an all-too-familiar tale to tell: a recently deceased husband; the lack of a ration card which promises access to free or inexpensive food; and a village without water, power, schools or health centres. Not one child from the 50-odd families in this village goes to school. The menfolk are perennially drifting, looking for jobs. And no one has heard...

Tamil Nadu's success in implementing the NREGA shows its commitment to social welfare, and the way ahead for other states. The share of women in the NREGA workforce has remained high from the beginning and is the highest in the country The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), enacted in 2005, has had a varied record so far. In many states, implementation has been lame (e.g. Bihar and Gujarat) or...

Even as the Right to Education came into effect on Thursday, the countdown began for lakhs of unrecognised schools across the country against whom action can be taken under the new law unless they get themselves regularized within the next three years. The task of enforcing this regularization will be humungous if studies indicating the proliferation of unrecognized schools are to be believed. In 2005, in a survey in seven...