-The Indian Express This is the highest demand the scheme has seen since its inception in 2006-07, an analysis of data available on the MGNREGA portal shows. The demand for work under the MGNREGA has soared to an all-time high, with about 5.53 crore households availing the rural job guarantee scheme in just four-and a-half months of the current financial year. This is the highest demand the scheme has seen since its inception...

-PTI/ The Hindu Finance Ministry’s draft guidelines state that appointments by way of nomination based on the credentials of past service and not through open market advertisement, should not be made as a “matter of practice and must be kept at bare minimum“. The Finance Ministry is working on norms to regulate salary paid to retired central government employees re-appointed on contract and has proposed keeping nomination-based appointments at “bare minimum“. Please click...

-TheNewsMinute.com Kerala has become a state fueled by a remittance economy, but the origins of this, dates back to several decades. In the summer of 1980, I visited Kerala’s Varkala in Thiruvanathapuram for the first time. It was the peak of the first Gulf boom. The media was full of stories on the ones who had made it big. But I was doing an ARTicle on the petrodollar paupers — the ignored...

-The Hindu With few job opportunities in villages, migrant labourers who had left the city in March are returning in droves The Anand Vihar bus terminal — where thousands of migrant workers had assembled four months back in a desperate bid to return to their home towns after a nationwide lockdown was announced — is again abuzz with labourers, but this time they are desperate to return to the city. With the lockdown...

-The Hindu Office cites ‘diversion of resources’ clause; former CIC Wajahat Habibullah terms it ‘misuse of Act’. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has denied a Right to Information request related to the PM-CARES Fund on the grounds that providing it would “disproportionately divert the resources of the office.” However, a High Court judgment and multiple orders of the Central Information Commission (CIC) have previously held that, under the RTI Act, this rationale...