-The Hindu A new website that will keep track of how far the RTE Act is being implemented RTE Forum, the 10,000 strong NGO and civil society platform working for the implementation of the RTE Act, has finally launched its website. As part of the RTE Forum’s agenda of formalising its structure, the website aims at strengthening the forum's existing state chapters and forming new ones. Mr. Ambarish Rai, RTE Forum National...

-The Business Standard   MGNREGA review should be based on more research Both acclaim and accusations have been hurled at the UPA’s landmark scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, or MGNREGA. Usually, the reasons for the criticism or praise are less-than-completely supported. For example, it has been both praised and condemned for providing local wage employment to the jobless, thus curbing outmigration; similarly, it is claimed that the scheme has...

Around two in five households in Kolkata don't have ownership or tenancy documents, while one in four live in the fear of being evicted without legal notice.  In Mumbai, 30% households don't have ownership or tenancy documents and one in five feel insecure against eviction, says the UN's Millennium Development Goals Report, 2012.  Released on Monday, the report says the most visible violation of housing rights faced by the urban poor today...

-The Hindu Technical glitches in the unique identification method make it unreliable in disbursing wages under the employment guarantee scheme   Within a few weeks of “Aadhaar-enabled” payments of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme wages being initiated in Jharkhand, earlier this year, glowing accounts of this experiment started appearing in the national media. Some of them also gave the impression, intentionally or otherwise, that this successful experiment covered most of Jharkhand....

-Live Mint Latest houselisting data demonstrates a visible growth in the material well-being of the two groups Indians, all of them, across class and caste, traded up over the past decade, a period of rapid and record economic growth—that’s the counter-intuitive message in the latest update to Census 2011. According to the so-called houselisting data released by the census, scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have, like the rest of the country,...