Action Aid in a new report has said that close to one billion people in the world are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. While the NGO has praised China and Brazil for successfully bringing down these numbers through community initiatives, India has been ranked low in the report. Brazil and China have been praised, but India criticised, in a new report that evaluates the efforts of developing countries to tackle...

The Bhilwara social audit team repeatedly came up against resistance. Yet the coming together of civil society and government in Rajasthan augurs well for the future of NREGA.  For watchers of India’s grassroots democracy, the place to be in recently was Bhilwara in Rajasthan; the town and the countryside were decked out in carnival colours for an audit exercise that saw thousands come together — social rights activists led by...

THE ongoing negotiations with the World Bank provide an opportunity to urban policymakers to reinvent the present form of JNNURM (called v1.0). Thus far JNNURM v1.0 has focused on upgrading macro-level dimensions of city’s environment, ignoring the social and economic diversity (e.g., mixed uses and building types) prevailing in urban areas. The top-down urban ‘renewal’ model underlying the present version of JNNURM is largely founded on the planning practices of...

In one of the biggest mobilisations of its kind in the case of any government programme in the country so far, some 1,700 persons are at present carrying out a unique social audit of the implementation of the UPA Government’s much talked about Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Bhilwara, the constituency of Union Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Minister C. P. Joshi in Rajasthan. Right to Information activists...

A series of social audits in NREGS works in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district led to unearthing of humungous irregularities and filing of FIRs against several government and panchayat officials and release of delayed payments worth crores of rupees to the ordinary NREGS workers (See details/ links below). The irregularities included the use of sub-standard material, non-issuance of job cards or post office passbooks and fudging of account books. The audits were organized...