-The Hindu Reports that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government intends to radically restructure the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have re-ignited public discussion on the scheme. Since its launch, debate on MGNREGA has been synonymous with ideological contestations on the role of the state and its welfare functions. Inevitably, the contours of the debate have been shrill, leaving little space for an evidence-based discussion on the...

Despite high prices of fruits and vegetables, India's area under horticultural crops - mainly fruits, vegetables, spices and flowers - has doubled in around twenty years (between 1991-92 and 2012-13). This has resulted in increase in production of horticultural crops nearly threefold (2.8 times). A new report from the Ministry of Agriculture says that the area under horticultural crops during this period rose from 12.77 million hectares to 23.69 million...

-Ahmedabad Mirror The Supreme Court on last Friday had issued notice to Gujarat government on a plea by an NGO seeking compensation to families of over 600 debt-ridden farmers who had allegedly committed suicide in the state from 2003 to 2012. However, information sought under the Right To Information Act by Mirror regarding the same from the Union Ministry of Agriculture revealed that between 2009 and 2013, no farmer had committed...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Supreme Court today castigated the governments of Chhattisgarh and Bihar for providing inadequate and inaccurate data on missing children and for not adhering to its order on mandatory FIRs. A three-judge bench of Chief Justice H.L. Dattu, Justices A.K. Sikri and Arun Misra, which heard representatives of both states, asked them to file fresh affidavits detailing the number of children rescued and the number of FIRs filed while...

-The Hindu The imperatives of governance have a tendency to make political parties think differently once they are in power and revisit earlier misgivings. Nothing illustrates this better than the Narendra Modi government's decision to go ahead with the ‘Aadhaar' scheme aimed at giving unique identification numbers to residents. The Bharatiya Janata Party had on some occasions in the past voiced its reservations about the viability and desirability of the...