-The Indian Express The Ministry of Rural Development seems undecided on whether to blame former Minister Nitin Gadkari or the media for some of the problems with the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). An internal note of the Ministry - prepared ahead of a Performance Review Committee meeting this month - blamed Gadkari for contributing to delays in the payment of wages under the scheme. Soon after...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Vegetables are the noble folk of food world, loved equally by doctors and grandmothers. Vegetarians live off them and meat-eaters are told to live off them. But in Delhi, under every crunchy leaf of radish or the shiny brinjal hide dangerous amounts of pesticides that can slowly kill, shows a new study by JNU. Pritha Chatterjee and Aniruddha Ghosal report how growers, consumers and the authorities may...

-The Hindu For the land-acquirer, the land act ordinance tries to lessen the indirect price of acquisition and transaction by diluting requirements for social impact assessments and referenda. For the land-loser, it not only retains all forms of compensation and rehabilitation, but also grows the number of those eligible for lucrative pay-offs The government of India continues to search for the right way to do land acquisition. Last week, the Union Finance...

-The Hindu The introduction of educational qualifications as eligibility criteria for contesting panchayat elections has shocked and angered rural Rajasthan, including supporters of the ruling BJP When the literacy drive was in full force, I happened to visit a village in Ajmer district with a friend who was a civil servant. There was bold graffiti on a prominent school wall, which said: Saksharta ki kya pehchan? Upar chaddi, niche baniyan (How do...

-The Indian Express The NDA government's ordinance to amend the land acquisition Act does not merely expand the list of projects that would be exempted from requirements of consent and Social Impact Assessment but also quietly makes other provisions in the law less stringent. It dilutes the requirement that unused acquired land be returned to the original owners, makes it tougher to prosecute defaulting civil servants, reduces the scope of the...