-The Hindustan Times Shimla: Even as the Himachal government boasts of having achieved women's empowerment in the state, everyday hardships are leading to stress and other mental and physical health problems among females in rural areas. Women have been the backbone of the state's economy but a host of vexatious issues they have to continually struggle with still make their life difficult. Poor healthcare facilities, lack of teachers, water scarcity...
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Dead Women Talking: A Civil Society Report on Maternal Deaths in India -CommonHealth and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan
-eSocialSciences.org The report is an outcome of a coordinated civil society effort led by CommonHealth, a national level coalition working on maternal-neonatal health and safe abortion. India has been reporting a steady decline in the country's maternal mortality ratio (MMR) over the last few years. It is in this context that several civil society organizations in the country came together in 2012 under an initiative led by CommonHealth called Dead...
More »NREGA scheme is not broken, so govt need not fix it
-The Hindustan Times If the news reports doing the rounds are to be believed, the NDA is planning to further dilute the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the country's single-largest flagship programme that has a budget of Rs. 34,000 crore for 2014-15. While most governments when they come to power do tinker with schemes launched by their predecessors - the MGNREGA was the UPA's pet scheme - this...
More »Telling the right reform from the wrong -Pramathesh Ambasta
-The Indian Express Moves to dilute labour-material ratio in MGNREGA and focus exclusively on select backward blocks will adversely impact rural poor. Before the general elections, free-market fundamentalists had lobbied fiercely to reshape so-called wasteful social-sector expenditures. Primary among their targets was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which, according to them, should become an unconditional cash transfer scheme. Post-elections, the late Gopinath Munde's espousal of the MGNREGA went...
More »MGNREGA much exploited, will go ahead with tweak: Govt
-PTI Amidst opposition in several quarters to its plan to tweak the rural job scheme, NDA government on Thursday asserted that it would go ahead with MGNREGA reforms as it charged that the flagship programme of the previous UPA regime "was allowed to be exploited for purely partisan purposes". "The tendencies of acquiring easy money and using government funds for political party promotion could be curbed only when a spirited team of...
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