-The Business Standard   NC Saxena, a former member of the National Advisory Council believes that the regulatory regime in the states continues to be oppressive. In an e-mailed interview with Aditi Phadnis, Saxena says that the fundamental problem in India is the low tax-GDP ratio and neither the last government nor the current one seems interested in increasing revenues. Edited excerpts: * The new government appears to be watering down a lot...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...

-The Financial Express The proposed MGNREGA changes can help plug the leakages and enhance agriculture productivity There is good news about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) scheme. Recent press reports reveal that the rural development minister, Nitin Gadkari, has instructed lowering of the mandatory share for unskilled wages in total expenditure from the current 60% to 51%. He has also directed, quite rightly, that 50% of the expenditure be...

-The Indian Express Moves to dilute labour-material ratio in MGNREGA and focus exclusively on select backward blocks will adversely impact rural poor. Before the general elections, free-market fundamentalists had lobbied fiercely to reshape so-called wasteful social-sector expenditures. Primary among their targets was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which, according to them, should become an unconditional cash transfer scheme. Post-elections, the late Gopinath Munde's espousal of the MGNREGA went...

-The Hindu Traditional hierarchies are too deeply entrenched to be reversed through one single measure; they need a concerted push, backed by strong will from different segments of society, including, but not confined to, politicians The rise of Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Dalit-Adivasi leaders in the political sphere is celebrated as India's "silent revolution." At the national level, this phenomenon has been especially marked since the early 1990s, leading to comments...