Bringing an aggressive outlook to the ministry of rural development, Jairam Ramesh, who took charge of the portfolio in July, has attempted to address and fast-track contentious issues such as the proposed land acquisition legislation and the census for identifying households below the poverty line (BPL). Ramesh spoke in an interview about his blueprint for the ministry and revisiting controversial elements, including identifying the poor and poverty caps imposed by...

Monija Khatun has not got her salary as ad-hoc teacher for 17 months, youth in Soliya village in Jharkhand have got no work under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) for the last five months and half of the newly constructed wells have collapsed in another village. These are just a few stories from a Naxal affected district of Jharkhand, where people feel alienated from the development process, even...

Tired of its own inefficiency in plugging leaks and ensuring timely delivery of ration, the Madhya Pradesh government has decided to take the privatisation route to improve its ailing Public Distribution System. The new system is being put in place by a corporate consortium led by HCL Infosystems with Edenred India Private Ltd ― a subsidiary of corporate meal voucher provider and multinational hospitality giant Accor ― and Virgo Softech Pvt....

Two ambitious government projects are competing for your fingerprints. While the National Population Register (NPR) of the Census office has been tasked with the mandate of providing biometric-based identity cards to all Indian residents, Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has sought more funds to expand the UID enrollment exercise to virtually cover the entire population over the age of five years. According to the original, but little-known proposal,...

Jairam Ramesh's removal as Environment Minister creates uncertainties for domestic environment policy and the deadlocked global climate talks. WHATEVER one may think of its overall impact, the recent Cabinet reshuffle was not exactly a damp squib. Its single most important component was Jairam Ramesh's replacement as the Minister of State with independent charge in the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) by Jayanthi Natarajan, a relative political lightweight with very little...