What lies behind Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s note to the prime minister asking for a suspension of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, for short) for three months a year? The obvious reason is that the big farmers’ lobby he represents is unhappy that NREGA has raised wages in rural areas and labour cannot be enticed to work for less. Under NREGA, labourers get paid at least Rs...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Total Matching Records found : 2068
A pill to cure all ill? by Nripendra Misra
One hopes that the hotly contested Lokpal Bill will reach its final denouement during the winter session of Parliament. In fact, the debate on corruption in Parliament and media has focused on the single demand for the establishment of an omnipotent institution of the lokpal with its powers of enforcing the citizen’s charter, establishing state-level lokayuktas and encompassing the bureaucracy from a peon to head of the department. It has...
More »Kolkata fire: 73 dead, AMRI owners to surrender
CNN-IBN The owners of AMRI Hospital RS Goenka and SK Todi were on their way to surrender before the Kolkata police at Lal Bazar police station on Friday after a major fire at the hspital in South Kolkata left 73 dead. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee claimed that at least 73 people are dead in the major fire that broke out at AMRI Hospital in Dhakuria in south Kolkata on...
More »Paid news to invite imprisonment
-The Hindu The Director-General (Expenditure) of the Election Commission of India, P.K. Dash, said on Thursday that an elected legislator could face disqualification as well as criminal proceedings — which could lead to a prison term of six months as well as a fine — if he/she resorts to “paid news” in any form of media during the coming elections to the Punjab Assembly. Mr. Dash, who was chairing a workshop with...
More »Farms hit, freeze NREG for 3 months/yr: Pawar to PM by Ravish Tiwari
In the first high-level red-flag against the UPA government’s flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that while assets created under the NREGA “may or may not have productive use”, the programme was “adversely” impacting the agriculture sector by “drawing out agriculture labourers from agricultural operations”. In a letter sent to the prime minister late last month, Pawar is...
More »
