After finishing top in 2010, Nizamabad slipped to fourth place behind Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam districts in the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in the state this year. The NREGS works suffered a big setback this year due to non-cooperation movement conducted by Telangana employees' association demanding introduction of separate T state Bill in the Parliament from February 17 to March 4. Sources said hectic agricultural activity...

It is not often that a social security programme the size of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS - New Delhi has spent Rs 40,000 crore on it in 2010/11 alone - faces an existential moment. But, April 2011 will present one such crossroad: the end of the term of a bureaucrat widely acknowledged as the prime mover behind the five-year old scheme. Brought in six years ago to the Centre from her parent...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

I am opposed to any kind of communalism or discrimination on religious or Caste lines: Hazare Beware of vilification campaign, Modi writes to social activist The clarification by social activist Anna Hazare on his praising Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his “rural development model” has failed to satisfy his supporters who threatened to dissociate themselves from the movement against corruption. “That is exactly what we are questioning: Mr. Modi's rural development model,...

That accountability is vital in a democracy was reinforced at a National Convention of the National Campaign for the People's Right to Information held in Shillong recently… If governments do not investigate corruption, people should have the right and power to do so themselves. When the idea of a people's legal right to information took initial shape in the dusty villages of Rajasthan nearly two decades ago amidst people's struggles for...