-The Telegraph New Delhi: The NDA government is looking at two possible steps to cut down expenditure on the job guarantee scheme that seeks to provide 100 days of employment a year to every rural household. The rural development ministry is exploring the idea of limiting the scheme to six months instead of a year in about 4,000 blocks that are not covered under intensive implementation. Workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

-Business Standard Limits funds to states under the scheme and still looking to reduce labour budget ratios The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had begun work on amending the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), restricting the coverage to a few backward districts, leaving out large portions of Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Kerala from its ambit. The plan was eventually shelved after protests and a debate in...

-Scroll.in The strongest safeguard against fraud is not end-to-end computerisation but clarity of entitlements: if people know what is due to them, they will fight for it. In a stunning admission of party hypocrisy, former Food Minister Shanta Kumar recently stated that the Bharatiya Janata Party's support for the National Food Security Act last year was just a pretence. Remember, when the act was being discussed in Parliament, BJP leaders (from Narendra...

The results of the District Level Household and Facility Survey-4 for the year 2012-13, commonly known as DLHS-4, are out and it shows that among the 18 states and 3 UTs, the percentage of moderate wasting for children below 5 years is highest among Maharashtra (i.e. 34.1%). Similarly, in case of severe wasting and moderate underweight, the situation is worst in Maharashtra as compared to the rest (Please check the...

-The Hindu Alleviating poverty in India requires not only cash transfers but also other enabling changes Advocates of unconditional cash transfers claim that they can be both emancipatory and transformative. They argue that people are quite capable of making rational decisions. And that this kind of basic income support can improve their lives. I have no quarrel with the claim that we must trust the poor. Such suspicion is part of an elite...