-The Hindu The GARV app puts pressure on State governments for timely and quality delivery “I am going to turn everything into an app and I am going to allow people to monitor daily what work we are doing, what work States are doing” — Piyush Goyal, March 23, 2016 at the Power Focus Summit Rural electrification has been an enduring challenge for successive governments. Given India’s federal structure, States provide last-mile connectivity...

  Social audit is an important tool not just to ensure transparency and accountability in the MGNREGS, but also for successful running of the programme. The MIS (Management Information System) data provided by the website www.nrega.nic.in reveals that at the national-level roughly one-third of all districts were covered under social audit during the financial year 2015-16, as on 26 March, 2016. The top 5 states during 2015-16 (FY) in terms of the...

-The Indian Express In Marathwada’s worst-hit districts of Beed, Osmanabad and Latur, households now have an uncompromising priority list of expenses as an economy hit by years of near-total crop failure goes into a tailspin. Beed/ Osmanabad: About 65 kilometres from the cracked earth that was once their source of income, Mandakini Mujmule, in her forties, and her daughter Anita, 21, have spent 16 days in Beed city’s government hospital. Mandakini has...

-The Hindu More than a year after 13 women died in a mass sterilisation camp in Chhattisgarh, it is far from clear whether lessons have been learnt or justice done Sixteen months after a mass sterilisation camp conducted by the government of Chhattisgarh resulted in 13 deaths and 65 injuries, viscera reports — from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Ramanthapur, Hyderabad, and from the Central Drugs Laboratory, Kolkata, to go with...

-The Hindu Business Line India should fine-tune its scheme to make it WTO-compliant The fact that the Centre’s new crop insurance scheme has hit a WTO speedbreaker does not really surprise. The EU, Canada, Australia and Thailand have implicitly said that in its present form, insurance payouts cannot readily be placed in the ‘green box’ — one that exempts CERTain expenditures from farm subsidy calculations for WTO purposes. They have, in effect,...