You see those hills?” Jamshed Kanga, an illustrious IAS officer, then divisional commissioner, Pune, asked the noted development economist John Lewis who was visiting him in 1972, pointing to the barren Sahyadri range behind his office. “I will break every one of those if necessary, but will not let a single person starve.” It was the worst drought in the history of independent India, with a monsoon deficit of 25%...

There are many critics and sceptics with respect to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which came into being because of political pressure that managed to overcome quite strenuous opposition from some of the most influential policy making circles. It is likely that much of this criticism is not really because of the declared reasons, like fiscal costs (which are thus far very little) and potential leakage. Rather,...

Sikkim has become the only state to bag the national award in all three categories for exemplary work done under MG-NREGA during the recent Mahatma Gandhi NREGA Sammelan in New Delhi. The sammelan was held to commemorate the completion of the fifth year of the commencement of this programme and to give away awards to the best performing gram panchayats, district MGNREGA teams and NGOs by the Union Rural Development ministry. North...

The Manmohan Singh government has moved in to restore the role of civil society groups in conducting the social audit of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in an attempt to weed out corruption from various levels. The Rural Development Ministry is in consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor General to remove the lacuna that had cropped up after social audit rules were amended in 2009 to eliminate...

The economy shows consistent signs of growth. The challenge in the new year is to make development more equitable and broad-based… 2010 was a year of relief that soon grew into despondency. We were relieved that India had pulled out of the deepest post-War recession relatively unscathed. The soundness of its cautious macro-economic management was underlined once again and the US economy is also looking like getting slowly back on...