-The Financial Express The government has decided to dispense with "levy rice", a mandatory system under which rice millers also undertake rice procurement for the public distribution system by buying paddy directly from the farmers, effective the next marketing season starting October. The system, introduced way back in 1978, is set to be withdrawn as the government felt that a lack of effective supervision often allowed the millers to avoid paying minimum...

-DNA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly knowns as NREGA, is the most romantic and largest development project in human history. It is extremely popular and invited widespread hatred. It embodies remarkable scope for alienated people and effortless corruption for powerful people at the lower level. The amount spent on it over the last nine years is about Rs3.50 lakh crore. The average number of jobs generated per year...

-Financial Chronicle From the inner recesses of Chattisgarh to the upper crevices of Sikkim, a look at how MGNREGA initiatives are changing lives The large blackboard outside the police station reads like a rate list. There are different monetary awards for Naxalites' surrender with different weaponry, the highest, Rs 4.5 lakh, for surrender with a light machine gun, Rs 3 lakh with an AK 47, and only Rs 30,000 with a 12...

-The Tribune In India, mounting demographic pressures are leading to soil degradation. About 17 per cent of the global human and 11 per cent of livestock population is being sustained on a mere 2 per cent of the world's land and 4 per cent of its freshwater resources. The year 2015 has been designated as the International Year of the Soils by the United Nations. Recently, December 5 was commemorated as World...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: From July 1, you can walk up to a chemist and ask for a 'Jan Aushadhi' brand for your medicine, with the government set to launch its own brand to sell low cost generic medicines. The Centre will procure medicines in bulk from public as well as private drug manufacturing firms and rebrand them under 'Jan Aushadhi'. These will be sold in the retail market at...