-DNA    Drilling into government’s draft of grievance redress bill, National Advisory Council (NAC) member Aruna Roy and her colleagues from National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information (NCPRI) on Wednesday demanded some critical changes in the proposed law to make it more useful to a common man. They also vowed to start a “public movement” in case government refused to pay heed to them. Congress led-United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government is already...

Civil society groups on Tuesday came out strongly against the Centre’s draft National Food Security Bill, which has not incorporated the National Advisory Council’s suggestion for providing maternity entitlements to about 15 crore women in the informal (non-Government) sector, as in the Central Government, thereby denying food security (breast feeding) to infants.  Similarly, the current legal guarantee of 'hot cooked meals' for children attending anganwadis has been diluted by providing the...

Government proposes to provide basic insurance coverage to an estimated 43 crore unorganized workers Furthering the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s objective of inclusive growth, the National Advisory Council (NAC) headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi will discuss ways of bringing India’s unorganized workers under the social security net in its meeting on 29 November. A new NAC working group on social security is working on draft recommendations that will seek to...

The National Food Security Act shall be rolled out starting next financial year spread in phases running up to the parliamentary elections, in what could be an attempt to do the loan-waiver trick in 2014. The government has finalized the bill bringing it substantially closer to the National Advisory Council recommendations. The government has resolved most of the issues that had been in contradiction with the NAC advice and intends to...

A revamped version of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the government's flagship social sector programme, will be unveiled on November 14. The makeover, crafted by rural development minister Jairam Ramesh and Planning Commission member Mihir Shah, promises to iron out administrative glitches that have dogged the six-year-old scheme, credited for boosting incomes but panned for stoking inflation. "We are ready with version 2 of MGNREGA. It will basically strengthen the...