-Hindustan Times The design of large injections of public funds for India’s agriculture economy needs to be informed with rigorous evaluations on what is effective for higher farm productivity. A wage subsidy for farm-labour is one modification that needs an evaluation, to generate evidence to inform how the MGNREGA policy generates employment when there is need, but without stress to farm production Indian agriculture is witnessing a period of complex socio-economic distress,...

-The Hindu Business Line The Government must clear policy bottlenecks for the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana to meet its ambitious target Amidst the government’s celebrations on completing three years in office, one flagship scheme remains a massive — and challenging — opportunity: Housing for all by 2022. The groundbreaking, affordable housing initiative backing this promise, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), plans to provide homes to 18 million households in urban India...

-The Times of India DEHRADUN: Officials involved in the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna (PMAY) are facing a unique problem as many Muslim women beneficiaries of the scheme are insisting on having their pictures clicked only in a burqa. Beneficiaries, all of whom are women, are allotted an amount of Rs 1.60 lakh to construct a pucca house under the scheme. However, before releasing the payment, the beneficiary's picture has to be taken...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A revamped central housing scheme promising shelter for all rural families by 2022 has no room for the landless. Dalits, Adivasis and nomadic tribes who have no land will be forced live without dignity as the Centre has discontinued assistance to landless people for purchasing land under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G), activists say. It has also dropped plans for a law to give plots to the...

-Down to Earth Eighteen months and Rs 4,275.31 crores later, not even 0.1 per cent of the project could be completed "By the time the nation completes 75 years of its Independence (2022), every family will have a pucca house with water connection, toilet facilities, 24x7 electricity supply and access." It was May 2014 and the Modi-led government had just come to power. A year later, during the presentation of Annual...