-The Hindu   Investment in a scheme that guarantees rural employment with minimum wages should be seen as complementary and not alternative to development activities A recent paper by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has argued that the "push" factors of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are not as important as the economic growth "pull" factors, for increasing agricultural wages. The paper has received wide media...

-The Telegraph Bengal - Defrauded Many households in Calcutta have a domestic help or a driver who has lost money by investing in Saradha schemes - a common thread that has spun a perception that the poor are the sole victims of the sham company. But Sudipta Sen's promise of high returns had blurred the divide between the haves and the have-nots as well as the educated and the uneducated. Travels across the semi-urban...

-The Hindu In the eye of the storm for funding corporate warehousing projects on terms far softer than those offered to poor farmers, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is now blaming the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for the transgressions. Following a story in The Hindu, (‘As farmers suffer, NABARD offers soft loans to corporates, ' December 10, 2012), NABARD came under...

-The Hindu   The educational and economic development of Dalits is seen by the backward castes as a challenge to the social order, as recent incidents in Tamil Nadu show On the evening of November 7, 2012, a crowd numbering over 1000 people burst into three Dalit settlements in Dharmapuri, north-western Tamil Nadu, and laid them waste. Over a period of several hours, they looted, smashed and burned. Trees had been felled on...

-Frontline   But in Modi's Gujarat the difference between development and darkness is all too visible to those who care to see. NARENDRA MODI may have won three consecutive elections and ruled Gujarat for more than a decade after he was posted there almost as a night watchman, to borrow a cricketing expression. He may have mobilised a massive fan following that is shouting to catapult him into the Prime Minister's post,...