-PTI   The government’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme is innovative and has achieved quite high coverage but faces challenges like uneven implementation across states and “some evidence” of leakage of funds, a new World Bank report says. The study ‘Social Protection for a Changing India’ also says ensuring higher degree of awareness among people about the process of applying for work under the scheme and a strong monitoring and evaluation system...

Three pronouncements made on three consecutive days this month by the Supreme Court of India have brought relief to different groups of economically and socially deprived people. The beneficiaries include children sold out by poor parents to work in circuses as child labour; young men and women determined to get married crossing caste barriers and harassed for that very reason by ‘khap panchayats'; and the hungry poor across the country...

The district that lost the highest number of people to militancy in Jammu and Kashmir appears to be making up for the loss through a baby boom. The provisional findings of the 2011 census show that Kupwara has the highest proportion of children aged up to six years among all the 627 districts in the country. The figures reveal that 22.5 per cent of Kupwara’s population is six years old or less...

Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...

The gruesome murder of NREGA activist Niyamat Ansari has shocked the progressive civil society and political groups in the country. According to reports (one, two), Niyamat Ansari had exposed a case of corruption in NREGA and an FIR was lodged against a former BDO and another Panchayat Sevak of Manika block, Latehar (Jharkhand). On 2nd March 2011, Niyamat Ansari was picked from his house and beaten to death. The reports...