The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh is seeking doubling of funds for water supply and sanitation programmes to Rs 20,000 crore in the upcoming budget, arguing that it is high time the Centre focused on this neglected sector.  Ramesh, who holds the additional charge of the ministry of drinking water and sanitation, has indicated that he is unwilling to settle for anything short of Rs 16,000 crore. The finance ministry has, so...

-The Hindu   Prompt payment through bank; corruption eliminated; in fact, some workers have a saving They are all manual workers earning Rs. 100 daily under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and some of them have a bank balance — no matter how small — made possible because of their financial inclusion and the introduction of technology that links their accounts biometrically through the Aadhaar number. As the new system ensures...

On February 2, even as Sonia Gandhi was speaking out against corruption in Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a 65-year-old RTI applicant from Bikaner in Rajasthan was brutally attacked after he tried to expose corruption in the MNREGA work. The ex-Sarpanch was allegedly beaten up by supporters of the current Sarpanch. Dudhram had complained to the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) about the allocation of Rs 4 crore for clearing...

West Bengal: An agrarian crisis looms over the State as farmers commit suicide in spite of a bumper crop. THE topic of suicide figured repeatedly in Safar Molla's conversations with his neighbours a few days before his death. The 18-year-old marginal farmer from Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district's Bhatar block talked about it quite casually, in fact even jocularly. Everybody in the village knew he was up to his neck in...