After forming syndicates, the liquor mafia in Nizamabad district is now targeting young workers of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme ( MGNREGS) to rake in more moolah. Towards this end, the powerful mafia succeeded by roping in village development committees (VDCs) to help them open more belt shops in villages. Though it was illegal, a majority of these belt shops are being run in residential colonies, slum areas and...

Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...

Rising farm wages, which have a major impact on food prices, may force the government to devise a blueprint in which agricultural work is included under a widened ambit of a government's flagship job surety scheme, a key government official said. "We may need to come up with some sort of a special agreement for wage payment to beneficiaries working on farms since they are privately owned," Ashok Gulati, noted farm...

Sometime this month, Justice N Ramamohana Rao of the Andhra Pradesh High Court will deliver a verdict that will directly impact earnings of the 114 million people who work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the Central government's work guarantee programme. The verdict will also indirectly impact earnings of the 400 million workers and labourers who toil in India's factories and fields for 'minimum wages'. The question Justice Rao...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) and civil society groups are clearly not happy with the government's draft of the Lokpal Bill, intended to check corruption in high places. But a public consultation, a day ahead of the discussions that the NAC's Working Group on Transparency and Accountability is due to have with government representatives and others, demonstrated how difficult it will be to get a consensus on a...