Despite tall claims, the NREGA programme is just a dud as most other “in the name of the poor” expenditures - and as much of a dud as predicted by Rajiv Gandhi A decade or so ago, Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy claimed that the building of dams in India had displaced more than 50 million people. This implied that one out of every three rural Indians had had to move...

I want you to consider some well-known, oft-repeated facts: * About half of India’s children are malnourished, a record poorer than the world’s poorest area, sub-Saharan Africa. * India is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry — about 230 million people — according to the World Food Programme. * India is the world’s second-largest grower of rice and wheat, and more than 50 million tonnes of foodgrains lie in...

Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...

Only seven states pay average wages of Rs100 or more per day to workers under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s flagship rural welfare programme, despite the Congress party, which heads the government, promising to make Rs100 every worker’s entitlement last year. The UPA had fixed the daily wage of workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)—which promises at least 100 days of work annually to one...

While more than 200 million slum dwellers worldwide have escaped their conditions in the past decade, the overall population of slums has swelled by nearly 60 million in the same period, a new United Nations report finds. Some 227 million people have moved out of slum conditions, largely due to slum upgrading, since 2000, more than double the target of improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers...