-The Deccan Chronicle Seven years after unveiling the rural job guarantee scheme, the Centre on Tuesday announced a major extension of scope of works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) in a bid to revive demand for jobs, which witnessed over 20 per cent dip in the last financial year. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday tabled the “MNREGA 2.0 — the second generation reforms”...

Union Ministry for Rural Development has notified 30 new works under MGNREGA, majority of which are related to agricultural and allied activities, besides the works that will facilitate rural sanitation projects in a major way. The works have been divided into 10 broad categories like Watershed, Irrigation and Flood management works, Agricultural and Livestock related works, Fisheries and works in Coastal Areas and the Rural Drinking water and Sanitation related...

A survey of 71 cities across the country conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has shown that officially 82 per cent of all the water that municipalities of these cities supply comes from surface water resources, and the rest comes from groundwater resources. But of these 71 cities, 11 depend almost completely on groundwater for public water supply. In the remaining, agencies supply water from surface sources by...

-Daily News Asia's rapid growth is leaving millions behind, causing a widening gap between rich and poor that threatens to undermine the region's stability, according to a new report from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). "Another 240 million people could have been lifted out of poverty over the past 20 years if inequality had remained stable instead of increasing as it has since the 1990s," said ADB's Chief Economist Changyong Rhee. The Asian...

Mamata Banerjee skipped today’s meeting on internal security but sought to extract her pound even in absentia. The Bengal chief minister asked the UPA government to bear the entire cost of deploying central forces for anti-Maoist operations in the states, arguing that Left-wing extremism (LWE) had “implications” for national security. “The LWE problem is not an ordinary law-and-order problem affecting a particular state. It has serious implications on national security. It would,...