Southern Kerala state is known for the lush expanses of cardamom, pepper, tea and rubber that grow on its misty hills, and the bountiful catches of fish on a coastline punctuated by lagoons and backwaters. But a cloud in the form of a a free trade deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc hovers over this picture of plenty. With the Indo-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (FTA) now...
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A better rural programme
The issue is not monitoring, but the administrative structure itself, at the district and village levels The Planning Commission has recently put out the results of an evaluation conducted by it on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), after a survey of 20 districts. This is the most comprehensive official evaluation so far, and it makes interesting reading, not just in terms of the performance of the scheme, but...
More »Dalits, the poor and the NREGA
Before tinkering with the NREGA in the name of reforms, the government must ensure that the foundations of the scheme are strengthened. No change should be introduced without a rigorous debate that centrally involves its primary constituents. As the Union Ministry of Rural Development attempts to craft the architecture of what is being referred to as “NREGA 2,” the principles that constitute the basic foundation of the National Rural Employment...
More »Jhabua on its way to becoming Vidarbha-II?
With shift to a high-input cash cropping system, the debt process bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘catastrophe’ If it does not rain over the next week, farmers of Petlawad tehsil and its neighbouring regions in Jhabua might have to go the same way as their brethren in Vidarbha did. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan recently declared Jhabua, along with 36 other districts, drought-hit. The agricultural apparatus in...
More »Multiplier accelerator synergy in NREGA
The concepts of multiplier and accelerator borrowed from macroeconomic theory illuminate the enormous potential of NREGA and help set standards that it must be judged by. Over the last few months, just as the economy entered its current recessionary phase, the mainstream media, which till then had been uniformly unswerving in their antipathy to NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), suddenly began to sing its praises. In all the gloom...
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