By stubbornly overruling the National Advisory Council, the government risks defeating its purpose as a body that speaks for the poor and the disadvantaged. HAS the Manmohan Singh government begun to regard the National Advisory Council (NAC) as an adversary who should be undermined? Going by their exchanges on key issues such as food security, wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and the implementation of the Scheduled Tribes...

Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan on Wednesday announced that the scheme for supply of ration rice at Rs.2 a kg would be extended to all cardholders, including APL cardholders, subject to certain conditions. People with high incomes and landholdings would not be eligible. Briefing the media on the Cabinet decisions, the Chief Minister said the Cabinet had approved the recommendations of the Ninth Pay Revision Commission with changes proposed by the Cabinet...

Haryana has distributed Rs 9,834.73 crore from March 2005 to March 2010 to the farmers for the land acquired by Haryana Urban Development Authority (16,362 acre), Haryana State Infrastructure and Industrial Development Corporation (19,868 acre), Public Works Department - Building and Roads (386 acre) and Irrigation department (6,618 acre). Talking to media, Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda said, the average compensation comes to be Rs 22,74,000 per acre that...

Among the many reasons cited for India to proceed ahead with the Unique Identification (UID) project -that it will facilitate delivery of basic services, that it will plug leakages in public expenditure and that it will speed up achievement of targets in social sector schemes -   the most specious is perhaps the claim that it will help India reach her public health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite impressive economic growth in...

The Government has revised the wages for unskilled manual workers under the national rural employment guarantee scheme by indexing it to inflation, Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said today. He told the Rajya Sabha during Question Hour that the original National Rural Employment Guarantee Act provides for wages to be indexed to the Consumer Price Index for agricultural labour. Against the Rs 100 per day wages originally approved, actual wages given are...