-Business Standard Environment ministry readies draft, which allows industry to fell trees in traditional forest areas without consent of gram sabhas After a lot of back and forth, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is ready with a notification to dilute tribal rights that would make it possible for most industries to chop down traditional forests without the consent of gram sabhas - a precondition that exists at the moment. After the Prime...

-Hindustan Times The government slashed plan expenditure by about 20% in the 2015-16 budget amid fiscal concerns, hitting spending on social sectors such as education and women's empowerment that were the focus areas of the previous UPA administration. In the 2014-15 budget, Arun Jaitley allocated Rs. 5,75,000 crore for plan expenditure, or money that goes towards creation of productive assets, but could spare only Rs. 4,65,277 crore this time. This is also...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Eight central schemes have been left to states following the Centre's decision to raise their share of federal taxes, but this has left the Union panchayati raj ministry almost jobless. The schemes de-linked from central support are: Backward Regions Grant Funds (BRGF) of the panchayati raj ministry; Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Sashaktikaran Abhiyaan (RGPSA) of the panchayati raj ministry; E-governance...

-Economic and Political Weekly The National Sample Survey Office's survey of consumption expenditure is woefully inadequate for estimating the number of food-insecure households in India. Future surveys of NSSO need to collect information on the four pillars of food security: availability, access, nutritional adequacy/utilisation and stability. The Comprehensive Nutrition Survey in Maharashtra is an example of such a survey and appears to do a decent job of capturing the different elements...

Quite opposite to the top-down model of budgeting, the newly elected Aam Aadmi Party-led Government in Delhi has decided to go for a 'citizen-centric' budget planning at 'mohalla'-level for the fiscal year 2015-16. Drawing lessons from the success stories of participatory budgeting conducted at municipal-level in cities like Porto Alegre (Brazil), the AAP-led Delhi Government has decided to launch this form of decentralized budgeting on a pilot basis in a...