-PTI GUWAHATI: The government's spending on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme in Assam has been declining continuously in the last four fiscals and it dropped by 13 per cent during 2012-13. According to official documents, the total expenditure, including both the Centre and the state's shares, in Assam on MGNREGA during 2012-13 stood at Rs 651.55 crore. However, the same was Rs 748.44 crore during the previous financial year. The spending...

-The Indian Express India is at the point where a low income democracy cannot afford to ignore the hungry Is India's food security ordinance supportable? The debate has been vigorous. It will help to separate the questions of process from those of principle. Whether an ambitious scheme of this magnitude should have been brought in as an executive ordinance or as a new law after parliamentary debate, is basically a procedural question. It...

-The Hindu     The Kerala government has not learnt anything from the Attappady tragedy. Nutrition levels of women and children, most of them tribals, continue to remain dismal in the area At the Agali Community Health Centre in Attappady, Palakkad district, Kerala, Kavitha tends to her four-year-old child lying listlessly on the cot, critically ill. The doctor says the child is severely malnourished. He also says there are eight such infants and children,...

-The Indian Express Why the proposed national minimum wage is the wrong answer to questions of unemployment and poverty The recent national labour conference - a trade union love fest with little real employer participation - demanded a national minimum wage. The trade union demand is a predictable positioning of narrow self-interest as national interest but the government's acceptance of their demand is unfair, delusional and economically stupid. Unfair, because it pampers a...

-The Hindu Developing and emerging economies may not exactly be dazzling in the current overall grim global economic climate of joblessness and sluggish growth. But the region has registered rising employment and narrowing income inequalities, relative to their rich counterparts, since the 2007-08 meltdown, says the International Labour Organisation's World of Work Report 2013. The backbone of this promising story are the middle income groups in these countries, which have...