-Economic and Political Weekly   Examining who the beneficiaries are of the Integrated Child Development Services programme, an aspect that has been neglected, this paper presents econometric estimates regarding the relative strength of personal and household circumstances in determining the likelihood of utilising the programme's services. These estimates suggest that inter-group differences in utilisation rates have less to do with characteristics and much more to do with group identity. The paper also...

-Sify.com A survey said 76 per cent of farmers would prefer to do other work, while 60 per cent wanted their children to migrate to and settle in a city. These are a grim reminder of the condition of the 120-million farmer households in India. The survey, by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Lokniti for Bharat Krishak Samaj, of 5,000 farmer households across 137 districts in 18 states...

-NewsYaps.com In 2005, the Parliament of India enacted a landmark legislation known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The aim of this law, renamed ‘Mahatma Gandhi NREGA' in 2009, was to create a legally enforceable guarantee of employment for any adult from rural India willing to do casual manual labour on local public works at a statutory minimum wage. Public works programmes have long been implemented in India...

-The Hindu     Even a cursory look at how Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have fared will tell us how the mere formation of a smaller State is no guarantee for better lives for those groups for whom these States have been created Smaller States have been the new political mode of addressing basic issues that were otherwise left unresolved. However, fighting for a new state and reconstructing on a more sustainable democratic content...

-Live Mint Mint examines why millions of women are missing from farms, factories, colleges, and offices in India, which has one of the lowest ratios of working women in the world Mumbai: Every monsoon, minivans ferrying women labourers can be seen making their way from the small sleepy town of Wardha to Waifad village, 18 kilometres away. Urban workers from Wardha have come to occupy an integral part of Waifad's farm...