Two sets of government data on UPA government's most famous flagship programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), for which Rs. 33000 crore was earmarked in 2012-13 budget, provide widely different figures for several states, a feature which experts say is indicative of the corruption in the scheme and weakness of social audit or accountability. The government has increasingly relied on Management Information System (MIS) for monitoring NREGA at...

The much awaited results of the National Sample Survey have once again spilled the beans about India’s effort in fighting poverty. The provisional results of the 68th Round of National Sample Survey (NSS) of household consumption expenditure (which is often taken as a proxy for income) finds that the average monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) at current prices in urban areas (Rs. 2401.68) is 1.87 times more than the average...

-The Hindu In the summer of 2011, production at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar plant ground to a halt, as workers agitated to set up a union independent of the Maruti Udyog Kamdar Union that represented workers at the company’s plant at Gurgaon. The strikes and lockouts eventually dragged on till the fall, and cost the company approximately $500 million in lost production. On Wednesday, nine months after the company finally agreed to recognise...

-Kafila.org Almost a century ago, Katherine Mayo published a book titled ‘Mother India’ that criticized the Indian way of living, and Rudyard Kipling  spoke of the ‘White Man’s Burden’. These writings reflected the colonial perspective that what colonizers did was in the best interest of the colonized people. Consequently, most well-meaning citizens of colonial powers were alienated from the horrible plight of the colonized. Purpose well served – unopposed exploitation. Years later,...

Tuberculosis re-emerges as a major threat as new drug-resistant strains develop because of mismanagement of the disease. At the beginning of the year, doctors at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre reported that they had 12 patients infected with TDR-TB, or totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, a condition in which the TB bacilli is resistant to all first- and second-line drugs used in the conventional treatment of the disease. Panic...