-The Hindu The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award 2014 sought to recognise projects that work towards improving the urban conditions of communities in Delhi We know what's going wrong, and we ask the right questions; questions which crop up while our car drives down narrow roads with broken street lights, landfills spilling over with waste we have created from nothing, and slums we cannot really imagine the insides of. Our city is...

-Economic and Political Weekly The current regime seeks to reform labour laws with the understanding that these reforms will improve industrial growth and expand the possibilities of enterprise. However, there is already ample evidence from within India that this obsession with reforming labour law, particularly in the way the government has done it till now, will not take us any closer in creating more jobs or a healthy industrial sector. These...

-The Business Standard The Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, like its United Progressive Alliance (UPA) predecessor, seems to be failing on suo motu disclosures under the Right to Information Act (RTI). The department of personnel & TRAIning (DoPT) had last month issued an official memorandum directing all central ministries and departments to upload replies to RTI applications and first appeals on their respective websites from October 31. This had...

-IANS Bhubaneswar: The government Wednesday decided to register construction workers from Odisha employed outside the state and provide them with all the benefits available to construction workers within the state. This was decided at a meeting chaired by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik here, said official sources. The meeting decided to extend housing loans subject to a maximum of Rs.one lakh at an interest rate of two percent to the construction workers. The...

-The Economic Times For one who had worked so closely to frame the world's largest job guarantee programme, known as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, it's not easy to see it succumb to pressure. It's no wonder that economist-cum-activist Jean Dreze will raise his voice against this, along with eminent academics such as Pranab Bardhan and Maitreesh Ghatak. Dreze says corruption related to NREGA and leakages - its...