-The Telegraph The Centre has brought back quarterly monitoring of the performances of all ministries and projects after having let the practice lapse into half-yearly reviews about five years ago. Projects and ministries will be set targets and these will be reviewed at three levels — by the PMO, Planning Commission and administrative ministries — plan panel deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said today. “We have set quarterly targets for all the ministries...

-The Indian Express An intriguing paradox of contemporary Indian politics has been insufficiently noted: corporate India finances India’s elections, substantially if not wholly, but it is unable to determine election outcomes. Money matters, but it is not always electorally decisive. The recent Uttar Pradesh elections provide the clearest illustration of this proposition. As is well known, the Congress, BJP and BSP were all better financed than the SP which, especially after the...

-The Times of India The attack on three environment and RTI activists across the country in less than two weeks has brought to the fore how environmentalism is a dirty and sometimes violent game in the hinterland unlike the soft, candle-lighting tiger-loving green activism in big cities.  Akhil Gogoi in Assam, Bharat Jhunjhunwala in Uttarakhand and Ramesh Agrawal in Chhattisgarh - green activists who used RTI to their advantage - were attacked...

With the threat of a failed monsoon and an impending drought, the need for public works and for greater numbers of workers will arise in many states, says National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy Despite all its seminal achievements, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act is at the receiving end of the most controversial critiques any government programme has received so far. We could perhaps invert this to say...

-The Hindu Saving the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) — the centrepiece of UPA-I’s achievements in the social welfare sector — from its many critics in government and the media who view it as a drain on the exchequer will head the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC)’s agenda in the coming months. At a meeting of the reconstituted NAC on Friday, its members discussed the role a re-energised...