-PTI WASHINGTON: India's rural employment guarantee programme MNREGA has been ranked as the world's largest public works programme, providing social security net to almost 15 per cent of the country's population, World Bank has said. India is among the five middle-income countries running the world's largest social safety net programmes, said a World Bank Group's report 'The State of Social Safety Nets 2015'. "The world's five largest social safety net programmes are all...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A new survey has shown that one in every two rural households is eligible for targeted government aid - a significant jump from two earlier estimates of those entitled to blanket benefits. The provisional socio-economic and caste census (SECC) data released by finance minister Arun Jaitley show that almost half the 17.91-crore households in rural India may be considered under various targeted welfare schemes, depending on their specific...

-The Indian Express The SC directive that Aadhaar can’t be made mandatory for any service — which the government can’t oppose until Aadhaar gets legal validity — has complicated the issue. On January 1, 2013, the Congress-led UPA government launched the Direct Benefits Transfer scheme, centred around the Aadhaar project begun a few years earlier. Teething troubles and implementation bottlenecks followed, the interest of the outgoing dispensation waned, and both Aadhaar...

-The Hindu The Modi government is determined to dismantle the two-pronged welfare paradigm. It is now an established fact that one area where the Narendra Modi administration has acted with a sense of purpose, urgency and resolve is in slashing social expenditure. Be it education, health, agriculture, livelihood security, food security, panchayati raj institutions, drinking water or the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plan, central government funds earmarked for social protection have been cut. The...

-The Indian Express Modi government has damaged the rights-based legislative framework without spelling out what will replace it. No  one in the last two decades has come to power with greater euphoria than the Narendra Modi sarkar. It has taken less than a year for that euphoria to recede and change to disappointment. There are sufficient reasons for this change. The celebrations of the first year in office of  this government are in sharp...