-The Hindustan Times Polpol Path (Jharkhand): Laldeo Asur passes his days basking in the mellow winter sun, his 70-year-old body now too frail for the rigours of village life. But it is not his advancing age he is too concerned about but the advance of modernity on his tribe, the Asurs. Laldeo knows that after him there will be none to practice a traditional technology for iron smelting, a craft perfected by his...
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Why Jharkhand Has Not Paid NREGA Wages in Months -Alok Pandey and Haribansh Sharma
-NDTV Ranchi: Launched in 2005 by the UPA government, the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act was intended to help the poor by promising 100 days of work a year to rural households at a pre-determined minimum wage rate. In the last decade, there has been mixed opinion on the success of the initiative. But in the last few months, the central government has said it has plans to modify...
More »Measuring Progress towards Universal Health Coverage: An Approach in the Indian Context - T Sundararaman and others
-Economic and Political Weekly This paper proposes an approach to periodically measure the extent of progress towards universal health coverage using a set of indicators that captures the essence of the factors to be considered in moving towards universalisation. It presents the rationale for the approach and demonstrates its use, based on a primary household survey carried out at the district level. Discussing the strengths and limitations of the approach, it...
More »Smart villages before smart cities -Osama Manzar
-Livemint Is it really smart to create smart cities? Or should we reverse our thinking to concentrate on making smart villages? New Delhi: What is smarter: building smart cities or smart villages? In 1967, I was born in a village called Islampur in Nautan block near Bettiah town in the West Champaran district of Bihar. My father soon got a job at the Heavy Engineering Corporation Ltd (HEC) in Ranchi, and our...
More »Economists petition Modi against dilution of MGNREGA
-The Business Standard Alarm bells on rural jobs guarantee law A group of around 30 economists from India and abroad have written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to ensure there is no dilution or restriction of the provisions of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). They have argued the scheme has wide-ranging social benefits, beside creation of productive assets. They have said corruption was and remains...
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