REWA: Having struggled for the past five years for their land, mine workers of Khara village in Madhya Pradesh still do not know what they are fighting against—a feudal social system, a corrupt Forest Department, or their own fate? Khara village is a typical example of how feudal forces with tacit approval from the local administration still call the shots in most of rural India.Three years of drought and a barren,...

In Maharashtra, where issues hurl themselves at you, the Opposition failed to mount a strong campaign on a single one of them. The front rows of the Mumbai-Nagpur flight are usually the province of the political class: MLAs to MPs, ministers and fixers. This time, though, quite a few of the occupants were celebrities: television and film stars, major and minor, middling and mediocre. It wasn’t the T-20 cricket match in...

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...

Soumendu Barat, postgraduate in history and Bengali Nasima Begum, graduate in economics with diploma in a computer course Sanjay Dutta, postgraduate in Bengali Oct.13: In Calcutta this morning, Soumendu, Nasima and Sanjay were preparing for the biggest gamble of their lives where the chance of success is .004. The jackpot? A Group D government job that will enable them to work as “peon, orderly peon, night guard or darwan”. Joblessness, the curse generations have lived...

The recession is a promising moment to expand NREGA with greater emphasis on building social capital in a big way.  Soon after assuming office, the first UPA government took an impressive step for the alleviation of rural poverty by launching the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It was, indeed, a wise move to insulate the programme from the vicissitudes of electoral politics by enacting the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...