Despite the Rs 5,631 crore — to be the highest in the country, which the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh had spent under the MG-NREGA in 2010-11, but it failed to show any good work carried by it. Its not just Uttar Pradesh, but half of the states did not find any work worth to be nominated for a national award for best performing panchayats in implementation of NREGA in 2010-11. There...

The discordant black-flag picket at the Golden Temple on New Year morning belied Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s clean-slate aspiration for 2012 but he is engaging in earnest with the challenges of what, in his own reckoning, will be another tough year. The Lokpal tangle controversially unresolved, attention is likely to remain riveted on politics, especially with high-stakes battles for Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and three other states under way. The Prime Minister,...

While some may view the food security Bill as the instrument of combating poverty, this distinction belongs to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the flagship anti-poverty programme of the United Progressive Alliance government. The proponents of the food security Bill at the National Advisory Council have promoted it as the instrument of fighting widespread and rising hunger, instead. But what is the empirical basis of the claims of widespread and...

-The Hindu   Alarmed over the declining child sex ratio across the country, the Union government has set up a Sectoral Innovation Council to look into the entire gamut of issues connected with the sharp drop in the number of girls per thousand boys in the ages of 0-6. The council will identify interventions that have worked and those which did not and also suggest innovative strategies, approaches and methods of interference to...

U.P.'s GDP grew at 7.28 per cent in the past five years, but the State ranks low in virtually every area of socio-economic development. IF statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) are the only criteria to evaluate the performance of a government, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh will have to be rated as one with highly impressive credentials. For, India's most populous State has recorded a...