-The Hindu Telangana’s experience is instructive The institutionalisation of “social audits” to ensure implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has been challenging. Since being included in the 2005 Act at the behest of social movements, social audits have been ineffective in most parts of the country due to government indifference. So far, 26 States have created social audit units (SAUs), but the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG’s) detailed guidelines...
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Jean Dreze, development economist and social activist, interviewed by Rupashree Nanda (CNN-News18)
-News18.com In an interview with News18’s Rupashree Nanda, Dreze, who was a member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and an architect of the National Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), says that there have been no major initiatives in the social field in the last four years, with the partial exception of Swachh Bharat. Government data reveal that the Indian economy is growing at a robust rate but noted economist Jean Dreze believes...
More »Pay rise proposed for midday cooks -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre is considering doubling the monthly pay of the country's 25 lakh midday meal cook-cum-helpers to Rs 2,000, but the unions say the proposed raise is too little. The cooks' current pay of Rs 1,000 - a fraction of the official minimum wages - has been static since 2009, with successive governments keeping a proposed hike pending for the past five years. Now, a year before the general...
More »Just 0.3% of Dalits got jobs via employment exchanges in 2014 -Swati Mathur
-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Joblessness is one of the key reasons why Dalits across India took to the streets to demand that their social and economic lot be improved. In the backdrop of widespread protests that saw nine people killed and many more injured in states like MP, Rajasthan and UP, data submitted by the government to Lok Sabha showed extremely high levels of unemployment among Dalits, lower, in fact, than...
More »Record government expenditure on MGNREGS underlines rural distress -Elizabeth Roche and Sayantan Bera
-Livemint.com The government expenditure on MGNREGS in 2017-18 was nearly Rs. 25,000 crore more than what was spent in 2013-14 New Delhi: The national rural employment guarantee scheme saw a record expenditure of Rs63,887 crore in 2017-18, the highest since it was launched 12 years ago, showed data provided by the government on Monday. However, high demand for work from rural households in a normal monsoon year (2017) also suggests acute rural distress,...
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