The state government on Tuesday assured that it will examine the First Information Report filed for paying extremely low wages to MGNREGA workers in Gudliya village in Tonk district. The FIR had charged six village mates for paying just Re 1 as wages to about 99 workers. However, after protests by members of various organisations during the monthly meeting of NREGA, minister for rural development Bharat Singh assured that the department...

Doubts are emerging over whether cash transfers, designed to strengthen local markets, also empower women and change gender roles in emergencies. "Gender relations are quite complex and you cannot assume US$50 is going to change that," Sarah Bailey, research officer at the Humanitarian Policy Group, told IRIN. "You cannot assume targeting women necessarily leads to their empowerment or promotes gender equality." According to a joint report by Oxfam Great Britain and Concern...

Representatives from 127 governments have agreed to add endosulfan to the United Nations' list of persistent organic pollutants to be eliminated worldwide. The action puts the widely-used pesticide on track for elimination from the global market by 2012. The decision was among more than 30 measures taken by Parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants to strengthen global action against POPs at their meeting in Geneva last week. The...

Senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh on Saturday defended his decision to intervene in the issue of the Maheshwar dam project in Madhya Pradesh, on whose work the Environment Ministry, headed by Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, revoked the ban on Friday. The ban on work at the site was ordered by the Ministry in April 2010, with the resettlement and rehabilitation of affected villages largely pending. “Yes. I...

Work on the project was put on hold a year ago Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has lifted the stop-work order on the Maheshwar Hydel Power Corp Ltd., implying that he was yielding to pressure from the Prime Minister's office and Madhya Pradesh politicians across political lines. However, while project promoters are now free to construct the remaining five spillway gates of the dam, the lowering of the...