Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra chairperson Avdhash Kaushal lashed out at the government on Wednesday for flawed policies that had retarded the development process in Uttarakhand in the name of environment conservation and made life miserable for both humans and wildlife. “There is an urgent need to change the Forest Conservation Act and Wild Life Protection Act which are colonial in nature and are also creating problems for people of Uttarakhand,”...

Development has a multiplier effect in terms of employm-ent, secondary activity and revenue to state, while delay entails loss for everybody. Tolstoy’s famous question, “How much land does a man require?” was answered when the Count who had ruthlessly exploited his serfs was buried in a grave measuring 7x4x4 feet. And that, Tolstoy concluded, was all the land a man requires. Is corporate and infrastructural greed in India today destroying the small,...

Cash transfers are now suggested by many as a silver bullet for addressing the problems that plague India’s anti-poverty programmes. This article argues instead for evidence-based policy and informed public debate to clarify the place, prospects and problems of cash transfers in India. By drawing on key empirical findings from academic and grey literature across the world an attempt is made to draw attention to three aspects of cash transfers...

If it took six decades for the Central government to honour the constitutional commitment to provide free and compulsory education to all children in the age group of 05-14 by putting in place the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2010, the State governments, barring a few, have failed to complete the necessary spadework even a year after the law was enacted. The spadework related to...

The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...