Do we, the Indian middle class, see the corruption within us? I was too busy being corrupt to join Anna Hazare’s camp last week. For four days, I heard nothing but stories of our Tahrir Square-like revolution against the corrupt unfurling right under our noses in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. But it was school admission time and I had some serious palm-greasing, document-fudging, string-pulling, weight-throwing and tout-chasing to do. I had...
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NGO reveals Orissa, UP NREGA discrepancy by Debabrata Mohanty
About four years after its first survey on the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Orissa's hinterlands that showed large-scale defalcation of money, the Delhi-based NGO Centre for Environment and Food Security today in its second performance audit revealed that 67 per cent of very poor Dalit and tribal households in Orissa and UP did not get even a single day of the NREGS employment during previous...
More »DMK's free lunches turn costly by N Madhavan
Eighty labourers, both men and women, are at work at Thiruvanduthurai village in Tiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu, about 325 km south of Chennai. They are digging a pond - about an acre wide and six feet deep - funded under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, or MGNREGS. Outside the work perimeter, two middle aged men look on, worried. P. Murugan and K. Govindaraj are farmers from the...
More »20,775 tonnes of smuggled public distribution system rice seized in 3 years by Jeeva
At a time when rice smuggling has become a political issue in Tamil Nadu, the civil supplies department's reply to an application under the Right To Information (RTI) Act reveals that as many as 20,775 tonnes of rice worth Rs 11.73 crore were seized in anti-smuggling operations in the state in last three years. The department also said that 5,152 persons were arrested in three years for smuggling rice meant to...
More »The Mirage of Food Security by Tejinder Narang
It is time for the National Advisory Council (NAC) to introspect whether its pious thoughts on food security square up to an economic reality check. There are three likely scenarios: (1) universal coverage at 35 kg/per month per family; (2) universal coverage with 25 kg per family per month; and (3) partial coverage (say, to 11 crore families) with 35 kg per family per month. In each case, the implications...
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