-The Hindu It is now a decade since the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme was launched, and it can be said with reasonable assurance that the programme has been largely successful in living up to what it set out to do: provide employment to India’s rural poor and improve their livelihoods. Sceptics of the spending programme, launched in 2006, had raised concerns that it would be yet another opportunity...

-The Telegraph The Narendra Modi government's decision to abolish the National Development Council is a further blow against the federal structure of our republic. True, the NDC did not have a constitutional status, and differed in this respect from the Inter-State Council, whose activation was often demanded by the Left, precisely because it was a constitutional body, for deciding inter alia on the composition and terms of reference of finance commissions....

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court has said that if states play vote-bank politics by obstructing central projects, such tactics will amount to a "breakdown of constitutional machinery". The court made the observation today while coming down heavily on the Jayalalithaa government for stalling a central gas pipeline project by citing farmers' interests. "We are not against farmers. But you can't prevent the project which is in national interest. If you (the...

-The Pioneer Ranchi: Tuesday would be a proud moment for Jharkhand when officials of the State would share the mechanism, which is said to have helped in implementing the world’s largest pro-poor scheme — Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) — successfully. The State has been selected alongwith two others to showcase its success in arresting the menace of delayed payment, often blamed for suffocating the rural job scheme. The moment came...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: The ongoing strike by municipal workers in Delhi has deprived a majority of over 12 lakh poor students of their daily nutrition in the form of mid-day meals. Officials said since teachers were either not reporting to work or not teaching, the attendance in 1,860 municipal schools had gone down and affected the distribution of mid-day meals. The mid-day meal scheme is a government programme designed to improve the...