A thinking government, regional or central, would ensure sustainable wages for skilled artisans and help them market the handcrafted products, instead of letting them join the NREGS queue. The design and execution of the much-touted National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) are likely to leave a lasting impact on some areas of our economy. Surely, the prototype version did not foresee that it would act as a catalyst for changes that...

The West Bengal assembly on Tuesday passed a bill to return to some of the original owners their land in Singur, which had been acquired by the previous Left Front government for the Nano project. In doing so, chief minister Mamata Banerjee kept her pre-poll promise to the electorate, which gave her Trinamool Congress, a resounding majority in the elections. The Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill cites “non-commissioning of the...

The government is returning to a 1970s mentality. This mentality used a presumptive distrust of citizens as an excuse for enhancing state power. It sought accountability, not through intelligently designed transparency norms, but greater discretionary power in state officials. And finally, it sought to curb citizens’ freedoms, not by directly assaulting them, but by embedding them in a structure of regulation that deters free expression. This mentality connects three recent sets...

-Reuters   Sitting at the edge of fields in the heart of India's grain bowl, Gurdayal Singh Malik shakes his head in resignation about the lack of workers needed for his 60-acre farm, blaming the government's flagship welfare program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), for the shortage. Ever since the start of the program, which guarantees 100 days of work a year for rural households, the flow of...

-The Economic Times   As kharif sowing begin in irrigated belts of India, farmers are changing the sowing pattern depending on the remunerative prices they got in the previous year. Cotton prices, which touched a 140-year high this season, is expected to see an increase in acreage in prime growing states of Gujarat and Maharshtra. Across Punjab and Haryana, where more than 90% of the sowing has been completed, farmers have...