-Press release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha and Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) dated 9 July, 2019 Even as many parts of the county suffer from drought, the new government at the centre has allocated a mere Rs 60,000 crores for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) for the ongoing financial year. This is Rs 1,084 crore less than the revised budget estimate for 2018-19. Expenditure would have been much...

-NDTV Three days after the Union Budget was presented, questions have surfaced over a nearly Rs. 2 lakh crore 'fiscal hole' in India's financial accounts. The anomaly was first picked up by Rathin Roy, a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council. Writing in the Business Standard, he studied both the Economic Survey and the Budget and found that the revenue estimates for 2018-19, in other words how much the government...

-The Hindu Official attributes it to clerical error GUWAHATI: The birth register of the municipality in southern Assam’s Silchar town says Sunirmal Bagchi was born on September 21, 1943. This did not prevent the 76-year-old from being marked a ‘foreigner’ during the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that had taken March 24, 1971 as the cut-off date for determining citizenship. Mr. Bagchi’s name figured in the draft list of...

-The Indian Express Harshad Ahir (34), city bureau chief of Gujarat Mitra, his wife Ketna (30) and their child stay in an apartment at Bhagdawada in Valsad. Ahmedabad, Surat: A bureau chief of a Gujarati daily in Valsad, his wife and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, were allegedly assaulted by a former sarpanch and his two accomplices on Saturday night, days after the journalist’s report, critical of a government project undertaken by the accused,...

-The Hindu It is imperative to promote community-based care rather than relying only on hospital services The deaths of 154 children in Bihar due to acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) has laid bare the precarious capacity of the State’s healthcare apparatus to handle outbreaks. AES has been linked to two factors: litchi consumption by starving children and a long, ongoing heat wave. As promises of bolstering the health infrastructure are being made, it...