CHANDRAWAL, India—Satbir Sharma's wife is dead. His family lives in fear. His father's left leg is shattered, leaving him on crutches for life.   Sharma's only hope lies in a new law that gives him the right to know what is happening in the investigation of his wife's death. Most of all, he wants to know what will happen to the village mayor, now in jail on murder charges. He talks quietly, under...

After being mired in controversies across the nation over multi-crore scams, the MGNREGA scheme hasn’t quite made headway in Bulandshahr district’s Anupshahr yet, say Bhamati Sivapalan and Yamini Deenadayalan “MGNREGA is a flop in Uttar Pradesh,” extended NGO worker Manish Sharma, as small talk, at the block development office of Anupshahr in the Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh. Despite having been in force since 2005, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment...

Government proposes to provide basic insurance coverage to an estimated 43 crore unorganized workers Furthering the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s objective of inclusive growth, the National Advisory Council (NAC) headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi will discuss ways of bringing India’s unorganized workers under the social security net in its meeting on 29 November. A new NAC working group on social security is working on draft recommendations that will seek to...

-The Hindu   It will have welfare measures and institutional framework A new National Policy on Older Persons, incorporating a range of welfare measures and an institutional framework for effective implementation, is expected to be unveiled soon. The policy will be based mostly on the Draft National Policy on Senior Citizens, 2011 headed by V. Mohini Giri, Union Minister for Social Justice & Social Welfare Mukul Wasnik said on Wednesday. He was presiding over...

-The Economist   The world’s population will reach 7 billion at the end of October. Don’t panic IN 1950 the whole population of the earth—2.5 billion—could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a British novelist, observed that the earth’s people—by then 3.5 billion—would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing...