-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...

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 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...

The government will set up statelevel independent bodies to carry out financial and social audits of its flagship rural employment guarantee programme, which critics say is riddled with corruption. The rural development ministry will also make it mandatory for state governments to submit a report on the social audit, which unlike other government audits, allows beneficiaries of the scheme to register complaints. The move to increase transparency in the Mahatma...

-The Times of India   Farmers in Sivaganga district have alleged that funds to the tune of Rs 8 lakh was misappropriated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) in Vengalur panchayat in Devakottai taluk. Villagers alleged that a panchayat clerk had siphoned off the money allotted for desilting a tank, a key source of water for agriculture in the locality. Based on a report on the alleged...