The gruesome murder of NREGA activist Niyamat Ansari has shocked the progressive civil society and political groups in the country. According to reports (one, two), Niyamat Ansari had exposed a case of corruption in NREGA and an FIR was lodged against a former BDO and another Panchayat Sevak of Manika block, Latehar (Jharkhand). On 2nd March 2011, Niyamat Ansari was picked from his house and beaten to death. The reports...

The need for the media to take voluntary, not paid, ownership of creating awareness for better participation of voters in the election process was recommended at a roundtable on the “Role of media in building voters' awareness” here on Friday. The recommendation was part of a national consultation on voters' participation organised by the Election Commission (EC). Other roundtables at the consultation pertained to fighting urban apathy, connecting with youth in...

Cash transfers cannot and should not replace the public provision of essential goods and services, but rather supplement them. Cash transfers are the latest fad of the international development industry, as the preferred strategy for poverty reduction. And now Indian policymakers are busy catching up. The idea was mooted in the Government's Economic Survey for 2010-11, and the Finance Minister made an explicit announcement in his budget speech for replacing some...

Cash transfers, the latest global development fashion, involve several risks in India, not least the risk of forgetting the need for continuing structural change. WHEN I was growing up, several decades ago, middle-class society in India was always a little delayed in catching on to Western fashions whether in music or dress or in other aspects. The past decades of globalisation seemed to have changed all that. Modern communications technology...

Five years is a short period but the achievements are awesome. About ten crore poorest of India’s poor have opened personal accounts in banks or post offices; people demand work because it is their right; it has already regenerated ponds and water bodies and other community assets in thousands of villages; men and women get equal wages for equal work and ordinary people have a right to audit development works...