-The New Indian Express NEW DELHI: Amid controversial reports of hunger deaths in Jharkhand due to PDS beneficiaries being turned away, economist Jean Dreze says that even official records show that a significant proportion of people are being deprived of food rations every month. In an interview with New Sunday Express, the prime mover behind the NREGA welfare scheme said “this does not mean that Aadhaar is solely responsible for the failures...
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India's not-yet digital postmen -Osama Manzar
-Livemint.com While all of the post offices in India are supposed to have internet (and be digitized by the end of the year), internet Connectivity is non-functional at several units Last month I read an interesting article about India’s postmen. It talked about the changing duties of postmen and the changing role of post offices. By the end of the article I was thinking of a scenario where our close to 2...
More »Chronicle of a starvation death foretold: Why it is time to abandon Aadhaar in the ration shop -Jean Dreze
-Scroll.in The recent starvation death in Simdega epitomises a much larger problem of Aadhaar-related exclusion from the public distribution system in Jharkhand. The recent death of 11-year old Santoshi Kumari in Simdega district of Jharkhand has rightly stirred the country’s conscience. The context of this tragedy, however, is poorly understood, not least because of the Jharkhand government’s obfuscation. According to the family’s video testimonies, Santoshi died after starving for eight days. Even...
More »MGNREGA, once world's largest source of rural livelihood, now a tale of decay and digital delay -Rashme Sehgal
-Firstpost.com Have women living in rural India benefitted from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGA)? MNREGA was introduced in 2006 and has emerged as the largest programme in the world for providing employment to the rural poor. While there is no doubt that MNREGA in a short span of ten years did help generate 20 billion person-days of employment benefitting 276 million workers from which more than half were women....
More »Modi Government Gives Shock Treatment To Social Policy -Jean Dreze
-NDTV The Modi government is finally getting some flak, as it should, for its confused economic policies, epitomised by the demonetisation blunder last year. Despite relatively favourable circumstances (including good monsoons and a decline in international fuel prices), the rate of economic growth is declining quarter after quarter. For manufacturing, it is even close to zero, according to the latest estimates. Statistics related to employment and wages are even more worrying....
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