-Tehelka.com Cleanliness of Indian cities cannot be ensured without job security, safety gear and competitive wages for sanitary workers. In a unique address to the nation on 2 October - Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary - Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his commitment to devote 100 hours every year to sweeping the floor, picking up the waste and dusting his windows. He also urged everybody to do the same so that Indian cities...

Documents availed through RTI reveals that the Rural Development minister Shri Nitin Gadkari has ordered to bring drastic changes in the schedule of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which includes changing the labour to material ratio and restricting the implementation of MGNREGA in 1/3rd of backward blocks in India (please click here to access a note on labour-material ratio prepared by People's Action for Employment Guarantee-PAEG). The MoRD has notified the...

-FirstPost.com With the hype of his Madison Square Garden show overshadowing everything else, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's US visit was dubbed as a great bilateral victory for India. As the popular consensus went, Modi wowed both the Indian Americans and American politicians and even managed to get a joint op-ed article with President Barack Obama in the Washington Post stressing the importance of the partnership between the two countries. Was it really...

-Tehelka Despite the serious toll it takes on women's health, female sterilisation remains the most prevalent form of contraception in India. While memories of the 21 months of Emergency in 1975-77, imposed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, survives even today in the minds of Indian men as the fear of forced sterilisation, the country's population control policies have shifted over the years since then to target the politically less...

-The Indian Express Ill-thought-out assertions about the efficacy of monetary policy can unhinge private expectations of inflation. The Indian Express recently published two articles by Surjit S. Bhalla on the subject of inflation in India (‘Where monetary policy is irrelevant', September 13 and ‘RBI, we have a problem', September 20). Bhalla's central thesis is that inflation in India is primarily driven by changes in the minimum support prices (MSP) for agricultural goods....