Matter begins: What is the impact of the National Rural Employment Guarentee Act on rural wages? That is the question that the pundits are asking today. It's a query which feeds into a larger question. Six years have passed since NREGA became a legal reality. What is its village-level impact? It's a complex question to answer. NREGA undertakes to provide employment to anyone who asks for it. Which makes it...

-The Indian Express   Any common man with a little common sense can understand that a person cannot afford to consume 2,400 calories on an average income of Rs 20 or Rs 10 per day, the Supreme Court said on Friday, raising doubts about the government’s norms for providing food security to vulnerable sections like the Below Poverty Line (BPL) population. Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma said the Planning Commission’s calculation...

Even though urban people are considered 'more aware' than their rural counterparts, in Andhra Pradesh, it is the rural people who are getting increasingly aware about the use of Right to Information Act, 2005 as compared to urbanites. According to the data furnished by the Andhra Pradesh Information Commission, while the awareness level among rural public about RTI has been sharply increasing every year, it is showing a declining trend among...

The government plans to pay `80 every year for three years to state-owned banks for each account they have for a beneficiary of the rural job guarantee scheme. This is expected to provide an incentive to lenders to ensure quicker delivery of wages under India’s flagship welfare programme. “We have made a proposal to the finance ministry that a public sector bank gets paid `80 per year for each MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi...

In a season when every self-styled warrior against corruption is trying to look for a new weapon to fight it, my guest today is Satyananda Mishra, Chief Information Commissioner—someone who has in his control the strongest of those weapons, the RTI. Actually when it all began, nobody thought it would be so effective. In a period of five-and-a-half years, it has touched the hearts and minds of people. The number of...