Odisha village gets pattas after nearly half a century. Land reform programmes get jumpstart They say home is where the heart is, but that’s not always true. Ask Arakhita Pradhan, resident of Chilipoi village in Odisha’s Ganjam district. On a cold evening some 44 years ago, the authorities forcefully shifted him and his neighbours to a place where no civic amenities existed. Reason: the state had built an irrigation dam that...

Behave well, step out of jail. Select inmates of Tihar jail can now work outside the high-security walls of Asia’s biggest prison, provided, of course, they have not violated jail manuals and their conduct has been good. The inmates will have to come back to their cells at night. The move to allow well-behaved prisoners to work outside the jail complex follows a recent nod from the Delhi government to a rehabilitation plan...

Unlike the dearness allowance that accrues to the salaries of workers every six months without any hassle, the linking of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) wages to inflation or the Consumer Price Index for agricultural wages has not led to a smooth annual revision. The revision for NREGA wages is supposed to happen every January after it was introduced last January. However, even a month into the new year, the...

-The Hindu   By filing a Special Leave Petition against the Karnataka High Court order directing payment of statutory minimum wages to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the United Progressive Alliance government has betrayed its insensitivity to the rights of the poor. The courts have ruled that payment below minimum wage amounts to “forced labour”, which is constitutionally prohibited. The Centre's implacable stand that workers employed...

In the initial months of governance by the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, attempts appear to have been made to begin subverting the positive results of the land reform programme of the Left Front. What is happening appears to be the inevitable outcome of political rivalry, the hegemonic rule of one party giving place to another, with the citadel of power changing its colour, making the “red” one “green”. But...