-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...
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Hill of death -Alok Gupta
-Down to Earth More than 200 people in 14 villages near Roro hill in Jharkhand are dying slowly because of an abandoned asbestos mine During a film shoot at the beautiful Roro hill in Jharkhand's Chaibasa district, the villain takes out his gun to kill a young man. The moment he shoots, onlooker Rango Deogam bursts into laughter and yells at the camera crew, "You are shooting a death scene on the...
More »Slain whistleblowers’ kin push for anti-graft bills -Avijit Ghosh
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Satyendra Dubey, Amit Jethwa, Ram Thakur, Shimbhu Bishnoi, Satish Shetty, Lalit Mehta, Lingaraju, Nandi Singh - some of the names ring a bell, others don't. Some became primetime news, others were buried in barely noticeable corners of newspapers. But they all belong to the select tribe of whistleblowers killed in line of duty for daring to expose corruption. On Monday, their friends and relatives came from...
More »Everywhere, a Maoist plot -Nandini Sunder
-The Indian Express Chhattisgarh government is unable to accept the right to protest and unwilling to hear the people's voice. By going to town as the Chhattisgarh police and media have recently done on my alleged Maoist links, the real questions have been sidelined. As citizens of this country, do we have the right to protest democratically and constitutionally, and as journalists, researchers or human rights activists, are we free to pursue...
More »A lot rests on Aadhaar for govt -Ruhi Tewari
-The Indian Express The Supreme Court order restricting authorities from denying a benefit or service to any citizen of India for not having an Aadhaar card has put the Congress-led government, which had made Aadhaar the basis of its ambitious and overarching Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme, in a tight spot. The idea behind linking DBT - which aims at eliminating middlemen and plugging leakages in schemes - to Aadhaar was sound,...
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