Despite its seminal success in beginning a process of addressing issues of poverty, starvation and empowering the poor, the MGNREGA needed a general election to breathe life into it. However, the disproportionate influence of the middle class on social sector policy has led to the same set of pre-election prejudices resurfacing. "What use is the MGNREGA to the economy at large?" asks the businessman, one eye fixed apprehensively on the share...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

Seeking to use technology optIMAlly in health service, Orissa is planning to keep infrastructure ready for telementoring by which an experienced surgeon could guide a less experienced doctor from far-off place. “We are aiming to have telementoring for our State. Through the system a mentor (doctor) sitting in a super speciality hospital can guide another surgeon from hundreds of kilometre away from the actual place of operation,” said B. N. Mohanty,...

Striking workers at Foxconn India in Sriperumbudur near Chennai take on the corporate giant, demanding better wages. WORKERS at Foxconn-India in Sriperumbudur in Kancheepuram district, Tamil Nadu, have been on strike from September 24 demanding better wages. They also want the reinstatement of 24 suspended colleagues and the withdrawal of an eight-day wage cut slapped on some workers. That they have held out for so long is remarkable, not least...

The deck's being stacked against Posco. In the biggest blow yet to the South Korean giant's Rs 54,000-crore project in Orissa, a key committee of the environment ministry has recommended the withdrawal of forest clearance to the multinational's plan to build an integrated steel plant. If accepted by environment minister Jairam Ramesh, the recommendation of the forest advisory committee (FAC) could sound the death-knell for the country's biggest FDI project....