The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...
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Panchayati raj ministry turning irrelevant under PM Narendra Modi regime -Nidhi Sharma
-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The panchayati raj ministry, created by the UPA government to drive Rajiv Gandhi's idea of empowering gram sabhas, is struggling to remain relevant under the Narendra Modi regime. Finance minister Arun Jaitley, in his budget presentation, slashed the panchayati raj ministry's plan outlay to a meagre Rs 94 crore in 2015-16 from Rs 7,000 crore this fiscal, and transferred its flagship schemes - the Backward Regions Grants...
More »Food Ministry rejects FCI committee's suggestion on food law
-PTI NEW DELHI: The Food Ministry today rejected the Shanta Kumar committee's suggestion to cut the number of beneficiaries under the food security law to 40 per cent of the population against the current 67 per cent. In its views on the Shanta Kumar's panel report on the FCI restructuring submitted to the Prime Minister's office (PMO) today, the Food Ministry has also disagreed on movement of foodgrains in containers in the...
More »Centre's new fund distribution plan dents flagship health, AIDS programmes
-Reuters NEW DELHI: India's main public health programmes, aimed at millions of rural poor, have been in disarray for months because the government changed the way that over $1.3 billion of central funds were distributed, according to data and letters seen by Reuters. In a bid last year to give states more power, the Union health ministry started sending funds for public health programmes to state treasuries, instead of direct transfers to...
More »Participatory Budget knocking on Delhi's door
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...
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