-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Indian Express This year's edition of the Human Development Report contains a set of practical recommendations The 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) draws attention to the urgent need to address human vulnerabilities and build resilience as conditions for accelerating and sustaining progress. Human insecurity stems from not only low and uncertain incomes, but from many other sources, including inadequate access to health, food and shelter, unsafe environments, and inadequate protection of...

-The Hindu SAGE has raised demand to declare Mysore a GMO-Free City Mysore: Being a region where organic and natural farming is popular, activists called for declaring Mysore a GMO-Free City (Genetically Modified Organism-Free City) more than three years ago. The Southern Action on Genetic Engineering (SAGE) had raised the demand for a ‘GMO-Free Mysore' in keeping with Mysore's heritage character. The activists had argued that just as the built heritage of a city...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Sanitation projects to reduce open defecation, increasing green cover and emphasis on creating assets form the crux of the Narendra Modi-led government's blueprint for redeploying UPA's flagship social sector programme - the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or MGNREGA. Top officials aware of the government's re-orientation roadmap for the rural employment guarantee scheme, being steered by rural development minister Nitin Gadkari, told ET that assessment...

-The Times of India SYDNEY: World Food Programme executive director Ertharin Cousin said she is in talks with the Indian government and states to explore food vouchers for the poor facing starvation and malnourishment. Cousin said vouchers are important in taking food to those who face shortage. "We are talking to India on how food vouchers can be used to make food available to the vulnerable groups," she told TOI on the...