-Economic and Political Weekly   The stage is all set for the resumption of iron ore mining in Goa after it was suspended in the state in 2012, to curb its indiscriminate and illegal mining. The Goa government's decision to renew the mining leases comes at a time when the economics of iron ore mining have changed and environmental concerns have gained more prominence. Pamela D'Mello (dmello.pamela@gmail.com) is a Goa-based journalist. The state government...

Quite opposite to the top-down model of budgeting, the newly elected Aam Aadmi Party-led Government in Delhi has decided to go for a 'citizen-centric' budget planning at 'mohalla'-level for the fiscal year 2015-16. Drawing lessons from the success stories of participatory budgeting conducted at municipal-level in cities like Porto Alegre (Brazil), the AAP-led Delhi Government has decided to launch this form of decentralized budgeting on a pilot basis in a...

-The Indian Express Recently, the Central government invited comments on its Draft National Health Policy (DNHP). The DNHP provides an exhaustive coverage of health issues and challenges facing this much neglected sector. Its major recommendations are making health a justiciable right and denial of care an offence; provisioning of health services through a strengthened public health delivery system in partnership with the private sector; enhancing public spending from the current level...

-The Hindu Business Line   There's no Malthusian problem right now, but without sustainable farming the world will be in serious trouble Food security, a seemingly innocuous phrase, is fast becoming one of the most widely discussed topics of our time. A lot of us would associate ‘food security' as a challenge for the impoverished but it could potentially become a much more widespread problem straddling across geographic and economic divides. The issue of...

-DNA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly knowns as NREGA, is the most romantic and largest development project in human history. It is extremely popular and invited widespread hatred. It embodies remarkable scope for alienated people and effortless corruption for powerful people at the lower level. The amount spent on it over the last nine years is about Rs3.50 lakh crore. The average number of jobs generated per year...