-The Indian Express India's 2005 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) creates a justiciable "right to work" by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Employment is provided in public works projects at a stipulated wage. The Central government proposes to allow a greater share of the cost of projects under the scheme to...

-Outlook Washington: An Indian medical researcher has been awarded the US-based Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 2014 Sarnat Prize for his contributions to improving mental health care in developing countries. Vikram Patel yesterday was presented with the Sarnat Prize, which consists of a medal and USD 20,000, at IOM's annual meeting in Washington. "Through his research, Vikram Patel not only brought a largely unacknowledged problem - mental health disorders in developing nations - into...

-The Times of India A Reserve Bank of India paper says that the UPA flagship MGNREGA or the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, under which a household is assured of 100 days of wages per year in return for working on various rural development, has not actually contributed to the rise in food inflation as generally perceived. Incidently, the Reserve Bank was among the first to point that the...

-The Hindustan Times The government plans to put up coal mines for bidding by private steel, power and cement companies and introduce changes in the law to enable commercial mining in the future, signalling its intent to fully open the sector to private players. The new auction-based system will replace the earlier controversial policy of allotting coal blocks based on recommendations of a panel of bureaucrats, which the Supreme Court had struck...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...