-The Times of India • What does the Finance Commission do? In India’s federal structure, taxation powers and obligations for various services — like law and order, health, education — are unequally shared between the Centre and the states. Hence, the Constitution mandates the setting up of a Finance Commission (FC) every five years to recommend how revenues from central taxes should be shared between the Centre and the states. A fair...
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An unwritten social boycott scripting the fate of many -Niha Masih
-Hindustan Times Many face backlash and are boycotted from their communities for marrying outside their caste. With the social boycott bill, that came into effect last July, there is hope for the victims. Pune: On a cloudy Thursday morning in January, 1990, in Pune’s Cantt area, Umesh and Manju walked out of their homes separately — anxious and excited. After a month of waiting, the court had given them a date...
More »Food for thought: do Attappady community kitchens serve the needy? -KA Shaji
-The Hindu Amid criticism from SC/ST panel, experts say project must continue Now in her late twenties, Veeramma Selvan of Thekkekadampara tribal hamlet in Sholayur gram panchayat of Attappady has reasons to believe that her gods have stopped smiling. It was in January last year that she lost her five-month-old, underweight son Balu — her fourth child — allegedly due to milk aspiration. (a medical condition in which the mother's milk goes...
More »NREGA turns its focus on farm ponds -Aswin J Kumar
-The Times of India Thiruvananthapuram: The efforts of district NREGA cell to recreate assets to deal with possible drought situation have produced good results in some of the rural Panchayats in the district. Construction of farm ponds which was extensively carried out under employment guarantee scheme has gifted the district with over 2,000 farm ponds in areas where agriculture is the predominant occupation. The move also triggered a shift from the usual...
More »'Digital India' Actually Made MGNREGA Less Transparent -Nikhil Shenoy
-TheWire.in The MGNREGA website used to be something of a gold standard on information dissemination. But not anymore. Sanjay Sahni is an anti-corruption activist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Formally educated only till Class 5, he used to work as an electrician in Delhi until 2012. He came across the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) website by chance, and after several hours of navigating through the complicated web pages, he saw...
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