West Bengal, Chhattisgarh are the best performers in providing jobs for the disabled, says govt data Bishnu Chaudhary and his wife Vijaya Devi, both stricken by polio, have been waiting for work for the past two years. But on 2 October, Chaudhary and others like him picked up the shovel to show that they too are able. “We wanted to show that we can also work, just like everyone else...

In the final analysis, what makes any NREGA social audit worth all the pain and effort is the awareness it creates among poor beneficiaries. It is a measure of the hard labour that awaits NREGA activists in other States that a social audit conducted under blazing arc lights, and with so much official support, such as the one in Bhilwara in Rajasthan, could run into so many roadblocks. Virtually all...

Development literature is now increasingly talking about rights-based development built on the appeal of the right-rhetoric when every government professes its commitment to realising human rights. Human rights are norms that bind a society and governments derive their legitimacy from fulfilling them. The source of these rights is many — natural rights, divine rights, inherent rights of human beings or self-evidence. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 considered these...

The Bhilwara social audit team repeatedly came up against resistance. Yet the coming together of civil society and government in Rajasthan augurs well for the future of NREGA.  For watchers of India’s grassroots democracy, the place to be in recently was Bhilwara in Rajasthan; the town and the countryside were decked out in carnival colours for an audit exercise that saw thousands come together — social rights activists led by...

In one of the biggest mobilisations of its kind in the case of any government programme in the country so far, some 1,700 persons are at present carrying out a unique social audit of the implementation of the UPA Government’s much talked about Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Bhilwara, the constituency of Union Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Minister C. P. Joshi in Rajasthan. Right to Information activists...