An evaluation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in the State has found several shortcomings in the implementation including corruption, inefficiency and lack of awareness about the programme. The draft of the evaluation, conducted by two researchers of the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) has found that while the rules stipulate that each worker entitled to get 100 days of employment under the scheme should have...

Later this week, the Registrar General of India (RGI) will unveil the first flush of its findings from the 15th census. This once-in-a-decade effort is the seventh in independent India and is expected to showcase an entirely new set of vital Statistics, consistent with the ongoing social and economic transformation of the country and something that should enthuse demographers and policy planners alike. Expectations are that the array of socio-economic data...

A pilot survey finding that 25-30% of the rural population can be automatically excluded from food security entitlements for below poverty line population might help forge a consensus between the government and the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council. The "automatic exclusion" criteria, devised on the basis of the N C Saxena report on methodology for a BPL census, is more liberal than the "bare bones" approach adopted by the government in...

More than 105 people in India were sentenced to death in 2010, but no one was executed during the year, human rights watchdog Amnesty International has claimed. Releasing Amnesty International's (AI) annual global Death Penalty Statistics, its Secretary General Salil Shetty said minority of states that “continue to systematically use the death penalty were responsible for thousands of executions in 2010, defying the global anti-death penalty trend.” Noting that Asia and the...

India is expected to witness 5.4 per cent growth in the farm sector in the current fiscal 2010-11 as indicated by substantial expansion in area and production of major crops in both Kharif and Rabi seasons, official sources said today. "In the first half of 2010-11, farm sector has achieved growth of 3.8 per cent, rebounding from -0.1 per cent and 0.4 per cent in the previous two years," an official...