-The Times of India Jaipur: At Jawaja in Ajmer and Bhim in Rajsamand, workers associated with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) met in large numbers to speak of their problems. It was on February 2, 2006, that NREGA was first implemented in 200 districts of the country. Friday, thus, marked the 12th anniversary of the launch of this programme. People sought not just 100 days as at...
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Another Budget, Another Year of Ignoring Binding Laws on Rights -Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy
-TheWire.in The making of the Union Budget has been a far too secretive and hidden exercise. Social sector expenditure and allocations related to policy announcements should be matters of open ongoing debate. On December 20, 2017, a group of 60 eminent economists sent an open letter to the finance minister stating: “We are writing to draw your attention to two urgent priorities for the forthcoming budget.” The first was to increase the central...
More »Aadhaar is fine to stop some kinds of leakage and corruption. But it is no panacea. -Maitreesh Ghatak
-The Economic Times The art of good governance is through trial and error, figuring out what works where and how, and scaling up from below. Only then can one have a solid foundation. Aadhaar literally means something that holds (dhaaran: to hold). The word is interpreted either as a foundation or base (such as, to a building), or a container (such as, of water), even though given that it is an identity-verifying...
More »Why farmers don't have electoral clout -Avik Saha and Yogendra Yadav
-Down to Earth Although farmers vote at least as much, if not more than industrial workers or urban middle classes, elections are not fought around farmers' issues Elections are about numbers. Democratic politics is about stitching together a majority. So, the larger a group, the bigger is its “vote bank”, and greater is its electoral clout. A social group that constitutes a majority can therefore dictate its terms in an electoral democracy....
More »Odisha seeks release of Rs 676.57 crore for MGNREGA wages
-IANS Bhubaneswar: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Thursday requested the Centre to release Rs 676.57 crore to pay the wages under the MGNREGA scheme till December 2017. In a letter to Union Rural Development Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, the Chief Minister sought his intervention for the release of the funds. Patnaik said the Centre was supposed to release Rs 2,290.19 crore to the state by December-end but it had released only Rs...
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