-NDTV.com In February 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a speech in Parliament, ridiculed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) program as a symbol of the policy failures of the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government headed by Dr. Manmohan Singh and, in his typical coarse style, taunted that he would bleed the program to a slow death. Exactly six years later, on February 12, 2021, Finance Minister Nirmala...

School MEAls ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon MEAl scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-The Telegraph The committee said, “The absence of reliable and authentic data/information on the numbers of migrant workforce and their movement back to their home States following the outbreak of the Pandemic has apparently impacted the relief and rehabilitation MEAsures.” Commending the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a parliamentary standing committee has said that there is no “better scheme” to provide “sustainable livelihood” to unskilled workers. The Standing Committee on Labour, headed by...

-The Hindu Permission required from MEA to hold them, and also for issues ‘related to India’s internal matters’ A new notification by the Ministry of Education that requires public funded institutions to seek permission from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) before organising virtual academic seminars is “unenforceable”, leading academics have said. An official of the Ministry of Education defended the order as a “simplified permission system” but there is little clarity...

-The Indian Express It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators...