-The Times of India MADURAI: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), rolled out a decade ago, has impacted households and individuals in a positive as well as negative way, but the adverse impacts of the scheme could impact the nation's food security, according to an authoritative study. What may set the alarm bells ringing is the projected decline in acreage under rice cultivation in states like Tamil Nadu and...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan today urged environment minister Anil Dave to reject a regulatory panel's recommendation to release genetically modified mustard for commercial cultivation, questioning the regulatory process and claims about the plant's superiority. In a letter to Dave, Bhushan cited a Supreme Court hearing on GM crops and described India's regulatory mechanisms for such crops as "farcical". He asked Dave to "withhold" his approval to the...

-TheWire.in Most technocratic interventions introduced in MGNREGA appear to be designed to aid administrators rather than for actually helping workers. In his 2017-18 Budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley asserted with great conviction that the ruling dispensation’s “initiative to geo-tag all MGNREGA assets” to put them “in public domain has established greater transparency”. In 2016-17, the rural development ministry started an initiative called ‘GeoMGNREGA’, under which it was proposed that all assets created under...

-India Today Each year a huge number of rural assets are created under MGNREGA. Ministry of Rural Development achieved a milestone today by successfully geotagging one crore assets created under flagship rural employment program MGNREGA. The geotagged assets have been shared in public domain. Each year a huge number of rural assets are created under MGNREGA. Since it started in 2006-07, more than 2.8 crore assets have been reportedly created. That makes...

-The Telegraph Chandigarh: The chief ministers of neighbouring Punjab and Haryana have agreed to cooperate on action against sex determination centres, which are illegal, and female foeticide. Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh of the Congress today responded to a Twitter appeal from his Haryana counterpart, Manohar Lal Khattar of the BJP, and ordered the Punjab health department and police to launch a crackdown on sex determination centres operating in Punjab. "I appeal to...