Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have blamed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) for shortage of labour, which has led to increase in input cost of the products and eating into profit margins. "Now a days there is scarcity of labourers by 25 to 30 percent in SMEs. There is a high percentage of unskilled labour, which forms the core of employee recruitment in the local small and...

It was the mother of all Nandigrams. If there was one Nandigram on March 14, 2007, then perhaps there were dozens of Nandigrams during the three-day cleanse-Marichjhapi operation in January 1979.    “It was Saraswati Puja. The police were just raining bullets as soon as the refugees landed in our village! Like everybody else on the road, I, too, fled for safety as I could see people falling either injured or...

Senior United Nations officials today stressed the need to promote the participation of women in decision-making, noting that democracy and gender equality are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. “While women’s political participation improves democracy, the reverse is also true: democracy is an incubator for gender equality,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks at a roundtable held at UN Headquarters on gender equality and democracy. “It provides public space for discussion of human...

The United Nations is predicting that come Oct. 31, the world population will hit the seven billion mark - and keep expanding till it reaches 9.3 billion by the year 2050. Much of this increase, according to the Population Division of the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), is projected to come from 58 high-fertility countries: 39 in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Oceania and four in Latin...

A LEAFY VILLAGE in Kerala, Pathanpara, never found access to India’s electricity grid. That is why for the last several years, this village has been generating its own electricity. Raju, a dhoti-clad cashew nut farmer, operates Pathanpara’s five kilowatt (KW) micro hydropower plant. He lives in the village and earns a salary of Rs 2,250, paid by the People’s Electricity Committee (PEC). The power generated is shared equally by the village,...