-Business Standard Also for other programme impacting the non-urban economy, in the wake of two years of partial drought The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) seems likely to get its highest budgetary allocation since its launch a decade before. This allocation for 2016-17 could cross the previous highs of Rs 40,100 crore in the 2010-11 Budget and Rs 40,000 crore in 2011-12, by then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. Actual spending...

-CaravanMagazine.in Bina Agarwal is a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester, UK. Prior to this, she was the Director and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. Agarwal has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation. Her best known work is A Field...

-DNA Before looking for 'out of the box' solutions, India urgently requires in-box actions. In the past year, India has been buzzing with the possibilities of start-ups. Many ‘angel investors’ from around the world have been pumping funds into hundreds of start-ups in the country. In the same spirit, Prime Minister Modi is chairing a major summit on start-ups tomorrow, January 16. The reality on the ground, however, indicates that all is not...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Researchers have detected what they say are snapshots of an imminent invasion of northern India by Hinglish that is set to shrink populations of monolingual Hindi and bilingual Hindi-and-English speakers. A study that examined dialogue on the Hindi reality television show Bigg Boss and everyday language practices has suggested that speakers of Hinglish, the hybridised version of Hindi peppered with English vocabulary, could out number speakers fluent in...

-The Indian Express A renewed funding squeeze may undermine MGNREGA’s recent revival, fear civil society activists. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme which guarantees 100 days of wage employment per year to rural households, may have staged a revival in the last two quarters after showing a declining trend in person-days generation during the first year of the Narendra Modi government. But the turnaround could well be temporary,...