The ministry of agriculture has written to the ministry of rural development asking them to suspend Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) projects during peak farming seasons because of labour unavailability. The ministry of rural development headed by Jairam Ramesh has still to take a decision on this matter. The secretary of agriculture P.K. Basu in his letter has rung the alarm bells by pointing out that the ministry’s assessment...

-The Times of India   As many as 19 government officials have been penalized for not properly carrying out work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act ( NREGA) in Sikar district. District collector Dharmendra Bhatnagar imposed financial penalties on the employees including three assistant engineers, one junior engineer, nine gram sevaks and six gram employment assistant. The employees were accused of carrying out work of Rajiv Gandhi Sewa...

A perverse, yet novel reason put forward to explain high inflation is that the poor are eating more as they are becoming less poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been extolled for being responsible for higher consumption, which in a way is a vindication of high inflation. The extended logic used here is that if the poor are eating more and we are paying high...

-The Deccan Chronicle   Six years after the launch of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNAREGA), the Centre is soon to commission a first-ever third party evaluation of the flagship scheme in over 100 districts spread across the country. The exercise is tipped to be largest ever conducted to evaluate the performance of any of the scheme of the Central government. The evaluation, which will be carried out...

-The Times of India   Only a handful of officials have read the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. That was admitted by the officials, who attended a review meeting on the national rural employment guarantee scheme on Monday. The meeting was convened in the wake of complaints from the elected representatives during a Karnataka Development Programme (KDP) review meeting on June 27 when it was established that the district...