Five years into the implementation of the right to work programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has the potential to create even sharper division between states than what existed before it was launched. This is becoming increasingly clear through reports like the second report of the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on NREGA, released last week in Delhi by rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. It is...

Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force. According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17...

-San Francisco Chronicle   Bihar's chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who runs India's poorest and one of its most corrupt regions, announced a novel bid to tackle endemic poverty: taking the state's bureaucrats out of governing. His administration placed advertisements in newspapers this week, seeking a team of professionals to manage a $1.3 billion annual budget for programs involving job creation, housing, infrastructure and microfinance. In Bihar, a state of 103 million people in...

-PTI   The Bihar government has decided to rope in professionals from the private sector to monitor the rural development schemes in state, Rural Development Minister Nitish Mishra said. "We have decided to hire the best brains from across the country to monitor ongoing rural development schemes inBihar, he said. The state government has already published ads in national dailies for inviting applications for the post of 32 executives and the recruitment of the...

-IANS   Assam has been allocated $2.5 million by a UN body to help improve hygiene in rural areas, stressing on the economic gains that would follow "when people spend less money on preventable sanitation-related diseases". India is among 10 countries - seven African and three Asian - which have been identified for a five-year project. India loses $53.4 billion annually due to poor sanitation and hygiene, according to a recent report...