Is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) a poverty buster? Or is it a job destroyer? The answer seems to be both, though the scheme of late, has been bedevilled by corruption and many states have lost their enthusiasm for it, forcing the rural development ministry to revamp the scheme last week (read here about the changes). While the scheme has been attacked for many reasons – bloating rural...

National Sample Survey Organisation's report on the average calorie intake per person in Indian households points to a much higher incidence of poverty in the country than reflected in estimates of the proportion of the population below the official "poverty" line. Among the features that sully India’s “growth story” is the persistence and possible worsening of malnutrition in the country. The subsistence nutritional intake adopted when defining the official poverty line...

Several undeserving candidates have allegedly been allotted money in a Murshidabad pocket under a central housing scheme for below-poverty-line people. Many residents of Gangadhari village in Naoda have been enlisted as beneficiaries of the Indira Awaas Yojana even though they already have a house and farmland, depriving homeless people. Villagers owing allegiance to the Congress lodged a complaint with the block development officer of Naoda last month accusing the RSP-run local Madhupur...

India’s decision-makers seem to find it difficult to see that there are children in the country. Being unable to see them, they are unable to perceive that they are hungry. In an age when we are able to use euphemisms like ‘under-nutrition’, this is perhaps not surprising. But it is disgraceful none the less.   This country has a large population of children. Fortyone per cent of its total numbers. The national...

MGNREGA 2.0 should really be MGNREGA 0.0 — it has been outdated from the start, five years ago It is a fact universally acknowledged that India is at a fiscal crossroads. It swerved quite significantly to populism over the last several years, and the consequences of this lurch are that the UPA’s own finance minister is (thankfully) losing sleep over the fiscal burden. More specifically, over the subsidy burden. As we all...