-Business Standard 80% of surveyed districts did not show any change in migration New Delhi: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) has succeeded in creating livelihood assets but might not have a big impact in curbing migration -- one of its objective.   According to a survey conducted by Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), almost 78 per cent of households covered reported an increase in water table after building conservation...

-The Hindu Studies on the Swachh Bharat Mission don’t confirm the government’s claims On October 2, 2017, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) completed its third year. Over Rs. 60,000 crore has been spent on the programme, but despite its scope and importance, there is very little objective evidence about its performance So far the numbers that have been widely cited by the government are from its own administrative data and the Swachh Survekshan...

-The Hindu Ties up with IIT-Kharagpur to gauge happiness levels Happiness, its pursuit and examining its essential nature have been considered the domain of philosophy, an ephemeral rather than tangible value. The Madhya Pradesh government, however, has tasked the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur with finding a quantifiable answer to that eternal question — what constitutes happiness and how happy are people really. The State government had, in July last year, set up the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Pre-school kids who have a better understanding of concepts like distance and shape have a higher chance of excelling in studies in later years, a new study has concluded. Rather than numbers and alphabets, the stress should be on helping children understand these concepts, a key person behind the exercise told The Telegraph. The Indian Early Childhood Impact Study assessed around 13,000 five-year-olds from Assam, Rajasthan and undivided Andhra...

-The Hindu The Centre claims to be fulfilling the Prime Minister’s plan for full rural electrification. But a close check of its own real-time data shows that the gap between official claims and ground reality is stark Haldu Khata, a village in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh, is one of the 7,008 villages that the government claims to have “electrified” in the last year, under the Modi government’s flagship scheme of rural...