-PTI WASHINGTON: India's rural employment guarantee programme MNREGA has been ranked as the world's largest public works programme, providing social security net to almost 15 per cent of the country's population, World Bank has said. India is among the five middle-income countries running the world's largest social safety net programmes, said a World Bank Group's report 'The State of Social Safety Nets 2015'. "The world's five largest social safety net programmes are all...

-Business Standard Agricultural marketing reform should first take states on board The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) has announced plans for a "national agricultural market" which would involve the integration of 585 major regulated mandis through electronic platforms over three years. Several problems in the current farm marketing system, governed by the monopolistic agricultural produce marketing committees (APMCs), might be addressed if this works: the multiplicity of mandi fees and licences...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: For lakhs of travellers, the New Delhi and Old Delhi railway stations may be just dots on the city’s map, but for thousands of children, they are ‘home.’ It is here where the police find most of the children who go missing.   As per records, at least 3,321 children were rescued from the two stations in the last three years. This year till June, the railway police rescued...

-The Indian Express The Rural Development Ministry has washed its hands of the matter while the RGI too seems reluctant to claim ownership. Amid growing demands to release the caste figures compiled as part of the Socio Economic and Caste Census, various government authorities having been passing the buck to one another. Officials have been saying the caste data, compiled from the first such census since 1931, is part of a...

-PTI India has made “impressive” progress in providing primary education to its children but it is still struggling to achieve similar results in lower secondary education and has the largest number of out-of-school adolescents, a UN study said today. According to the study by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFR GMR), 124 million children and adolescents are now out of school...