Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGA) has been in news mainly due to corruption or inefficiency. The country has spent close to Rs 40,000 crore this fiscal but a large number of urban middle class people and opinion leaders don’t know what to make of it. Cynicism apart, the rights-based scheme has proved to be a game-changer in rural India despite mixed success. The scheme has been relatively...
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Target Practice by Sunil Jain
Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...
More »Keynes-Hayek dilemma by KP Prabhakaran Nair
With more than 400 million Indians going to bed hungry each day, food security has become a crucial issue. On June 4 last year, the president made an announcement: “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban...
More »Poverty figure fight at Sonia’s door by Moushumi Das Gupta
The list of cabinet ministers unhappy with the Planning Commission's view on various policy matters seems to be growing longer. The latest to join it is Housing and Poverty Alleviation Minister, Kumari Selja, who has taken a dispute between her ministry and the Planning Commission over redefining India's Urban Poverty estimate to UPA president Sonia Gandhi. Sources said Selja wrote to Gandhi in August last week. "The minister has sent a...
More »UN honours IBSA for fight against hunger
The India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) alliance have been honoured with the 2010 UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) award for their efforts in the fight against poverty. The award recognized India, Brazil and South Africa Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation (IBSA Fund) for their hard work in using innovative approaches to share, replicate and scale up successful development experiences for combating poverty and hunger in other parts of the...
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