-The Hindu On most days, Central government staff work for eight hours The occasional surprise checks by Union Ministers to see if government employees are reporting to work on time may not have brought in 100 per cent compliance, but employees aren't as late to office as widely perceived. The Hindu got exclusive access to one week of Central government attendance data, thanks to the first publicly available database of employees, and found...
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River linking will not solve our water problems
-The Hindustan Times A few weeks after the NDA came into power, the environment minister announced that the interlinking of rivers project - which had been more or less stalled under UPA 2 - will get an impetus under the new government. The Centre has now started groundwork in the Ken-Betwa project, involving Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, while a detailed project report to link the Damanganga and Pinjal rivers to provide...
More »Govt may do away with tribal consent for cutting forests -Nitin Sethi
-The Business Standard Forest Rights Act being reinterpreted to avoid amendment Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is discussing possible ways to do away with the mandatory requirement of securing consent from tribal gram sabhas (village councils) before cutting down their forests for industrial purposes. The deliberations, on among various ministries, are for zeroing in on such a way that the requirement is removed without...
More »For new ideas, a clean break with the past -Shamika Ravi
-The Hindu Instead of reinventing or restructuring the Planning Commission, we need to replace it with a think tank that supports high-quality independent research The Planning Commission is neither a constitutional nor a statutory body, but over the years it has acquired tremendous power of distant planning which is unsuitable to a country as diverse and complex as India. Let us neither reinvent nor restructure such a body. Let us, instead, make...
More »Tilt the power balance in favour of the poor -Ashwini Kulkarni
-The Hindustan Times Pragati Abhiyan and a member of the National Consortium of CSOs working on MGNREGA India is a vast country and every year either the quantity or the distribution of rainfall is deviant in one part or the other. Moreover, Indian farming is still predominantly rain-fed. In such a scenario, the MGNREGA can do two very important jobs: Drought relief and drought mitigation. Recently, the NDA discussed the MGNREGA in Parliament....
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