Jean Dreze, until recently the intellectual driving force behind the National Advisory Council , is measured but unmistakable in his disenchantment with many current UPA welfare schemes. The economist who quit the Sonia Gandhi-led NAC in late June, won't comment on whether the UPA government has failed the NAC. But, he tells Ullekh NP, there's not enough empathy in the Indian establishment for the poor. Programmes like NREGA, he says, attract...
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India's welfare programmes are not very good at reaching the poorest of the poor: World Bank by M Rajshekhar
How effective are India's innumerable social security programmes at reaching out to the poorest of the poor? If a recent World Bank report is anything to go by, they are woefully inefficient. According to the report, titled "Social Protection for a Changing India", leakages and exclusion errors are endemic across the country. For instance, just 27% of the PDS . beenficiaries are the poorest of the poor. The World Bank found...
More »Sonia rushes to salvage MGNREGS by Anirban Bhaumik
Weighed down by an unending season of corruption, the political leadership of ruling the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has stepped in to rescue the regime’s flagship rural employment guarantee scheme from discredit due to mounting allegations of endemic irregularities. The National Advisory Council of the UPA, headed by Sonia Gandhi, on Wednesday asked the Manmohan Singh government to expedite notification of the much-awaited rules that would allow public scrutiny of the...
More »Low awareness of MNREGA in state, says study by Nagesh Prabhu
The awareness of the Centre's ambitious rural job scheme — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) — varies across different regions of the State and only 56.33 per cent of the households are aware of the scheme. Evaluation of the impact of the processes in the MNREGA in Karnataka (2011), conducted by the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, for the State Government reveals that there have...
More »Child labourers' plight: Underpaid and overworked by Puja Marwaha
For most people in cities, Labour Day (or May Day, which was on May 1) was just another public holiday that nobody thought too much about. On a day marked to give voice to the rights of the Indian work force, perhaps one ought to consider those who have been forced to join their ranks too soon - child labourers. According to government estimates, an astounding 42.02% of the Indian workforce...
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