-NDTV The "highest ever allocation" to NREGA (which also led to it trending on Twitter)  in the Union Budget has provided a useful opportunity to raise some pressing issues related to the implementation of the scheme. It is natural, and welcome, that the government turn to NREGA to provide much-needed relief to those whose already precarious lives have been disrupted by demonetization, a man-made economic disaster. Widespread reports of job losses...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre today proposed its highest ever budget allocation for the rural job guarantee scheme but critics rued that the increase was just Rs 500 crore over the revised allocation last year. Finance minister Arun Jaitley announced Rs 48,000 crore for projects and payment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, flagging the hike from the Rs 38,500 crore allocated last year (See chart). Social activists, however,...

-The Indian Express Protests by the people against inequality are producing governments that move exactly in the opposite direction We all know that the world is an unequal place, both across and within countries. We also know that across the world, people are expressing their anger and disgust at this inequality. This is increasingly revealed in extreme and often paradoxical political results. In the US, a vote against the establishment has just...

-The Hindu Kalyanrao Jalji has cultivated carom seeds in drought-prone Chittapur taluk of Kalaburagi district Karnataka: When disturbing stories of agrarian crisis caused by drought were coming from across the State, Kalyanrao Jalji, a progressive farmer from Gotur village in drought-prone Chittapur taluk in Kalaburagi district, was making handsome profit. Cultivation of carom seeds (ajwain), a spice widely used in Indian kitchens for preparing delicacies as well as in pharmaceutical companies for...

-The Indian Express Studying micro economies such as Bastar gives us the tools to highlight the rising inequality between the bourgeoise and proletariat. New Delhi: In Delhi University professor Nandini Sundar’s meticulously researched book, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar, the plight of the adivasis struggling to make ends meet paints a striking picture of the growing wage disparity in the “Maoist state”. Wages paid to the adivasis are strictly controlled...