-PTI   Congress President Sonia Gandhi today strongly pitched for utilising MNREGA to increase agricultural production, saying the flagship scheme can play a big role to usher in second green revolution in India. "I am of the belief that MNREGA has tremendous potential to increase agriculture production, which we have not been able to tap fully till date. There are many possibilities not only for creating community assets in villages but also providing...

-Outlook Only 30 per cent of Indian households boast of having at least one member with a ‘portable identity’ like a Passport or a Driving License. Such an identity, points out the economist from New York, is necessary for access to institutions and credit, which is why the biometric based Unique Identification (UID) project is going to be a game-changer. An alumnus of IIT, Madras,, from where he obtained a B.Tech...

-The Times of India The cry for speedy justice is going to be shriller in the next three decades as a conservative judicial estimate predicts that case pendency is going to register a five-fold increase to touch 15 crore but the judge strength will go up only four times to settle at 75,000. At present, nearly 19,000 judges, including 18,000 in trial courts, are dealing with a pendency of 3 crore cases,...

The total expenditure on central schemes for the poor and on the major subsidies exceeds the states' share of central taxes. These schemes are chronic bad performers due to a culture of immunity in public administration and weakened local governments. Arguing that the poor should be trusted to use these resources better than the state, a radical redirection with substantial direct transfers to individuals and complementary decentralisation to local governments...

-The Business Standard Reetika Khera Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi* “Aadhaar is being made de facto compulsory for welfare schemes. With two-thirds without Aadhaar, they are bound to be denied entitlements” There are three components of the government’s direct benefit transfer scheme — computerisation, extending banking services and linking the benefits with Aadhaar. The real game-changers are the first two, whereas Aadhaar-enabled transfers carry the risk of excluding current beneficiaries. The Central government has...