-The Telegraph New Delhi: The NDA government is looking at two possible steps to cut down expenditure on the job guarantee scheme that seeks to provide 100 days of employment a year to every rural household. The rural development ministry is exploring the idea of limiting the scheme to six months instead of a year in about 4,000 blocks that are not covered under intensive implementation. Workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

-The Hindustan Times A United Nations report on Wednesday asked the government to increase focus on rights-based programmes - like the job guarantee and food security schemes - to eradicate poverty while praising PM Narendra Modi's financial inclusion scheme, the Jan Dhan Yojana. The UN report on India and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the central government has cut the budget for social sector schemes and initiated...

-The Indian Express Chandigarh: A panel of experts appointed by the Himachal Pradesh government has said that popular opposition to large hydel power projects on the Sutlej is being fanned by the establishment's "indifference" to the problems of the people. The panel has rejected the conclusions of a report prepared earlier for the union government, which had said that the adverse impact of the projects can be mitigated by suitable measures. "...Opposition to...

-The Hindu While liberalisation's backers are not squeamish in admitting that democracy is an impediment to the free market economic model, farmers who are dispossessed of land argue that they are undercompensated and that the profit of private companies is not a public purpose Since it was passed by Parliament in September 2013, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR) has been criticised from...

-Scroll.in The strongest safeguard against fraud is not end-to-end computerisation but clarity of entitlements: if people know what is due to them, they will fight for it. In a stunning admission of party hypocrisy, former Food Minister Shanta Kumar recently stated that the Bharatiya Janata Party's support for the National Food Security Act last year was just a pretence. Remember, when the act was being discussed in Parliament, BJP leaders (from Narendra...