-Live Mint This week marks the completion of six years of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Six years is not a long period of time for any meaningful evaluation of a programme of such nature. However, even within this short period of time, the programme has attracted considerable attention. One part of this is the criticism of how the programme involved considerable leakages, did not create productive...
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Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Rural Development interviewed by Anil Padmanabhan & Elizabeth Roche
As minister for rural development, Jairam Ramesh oversees the largest spending in the social sector by the government. This includes the marquee Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) that was pioneered by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2006. The minister, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for his forthrightness. In a typically candid interview to Mint on...
More »Graft cases against public servants: Supreme Court raps PMO for delay in okaying A Raja prosecution
-The Economic Times The Supreme Court has pulled up the Prime Minister's Office for taking 16 months to decide on an application from Janata Party PresidentSubramaniam Swamy to prosecute then telecom minister A Raja. However, a bench comprising Justices AK Ganguly and GS Singhvi appeared to absolve Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of any personal blame on the ground that he could not be expected to go into details of every case before...
More »Food authority backtracks by Savvy Soumya Misra
Says milk adulterated but not unsafe for consumption Six states and a union territory feed their people milk that does not meet the standards set by India’s food regulatory body at all. Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram and Daman & Diu are the “100 per cent non-conforming” states. In Delhi, 70 per cent of the samples failed the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) test. Yet, the...
More »India deadliest place in world for girl child by Rukmini Shrinivasan
-The Times of India It's official - India is the most dangerous place in the world to be a baby girl. Newly released data shows that an Indian girl child aged 1-5 years is 75% more likely to die than an Indian boy, making this the worst gender differential in child mortality for any country in the world. Infant (0-1 years) and child (1-5 years) mortality are declining in India and across...
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