-India Today Already grappling with the Ganga cleaning project, the government seems to have a bigger problem at hand as the groundwater in more than half of the country's districts is contaminated with poisonous substances. The Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) has come up with a shocking assessment, according to which 276 districts have high levels of fluorides in their groundwater. At least 387 districts in 21 states, of the 676 districts...
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India's Rural Jobs Programme: A Dismal Appraisal -Jean Drèze
-HuffingtonPost.in In the backdrop of workers taking to the streets on Labour Day to protest against their status, here is why the government's rural jobs guarantee programme presents an alarming picture today. Declining expenditure Central Government expenditure on NREGA declined from Rs 40,100 crores in 2010-11 to Rs 38,597 crores in 2014-5. In real terms, this means a decline of about 30% over four years. As a ratio of GDP, Central Government expenditure...
More »Labour reforms: On track, but tough job ahead -Surabhi
-The Indian Express Niggling procedural hassles stymie efforts to modernise antiquated labour regulations. As it completes one year in office, the NDA government seems to have finally bit the bullet and taken up the controversial Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, for amendments that would allow easier retrenchment and closure norms for firms with up to 300 workers though ensuring that the employees get higher compensation in return. The draft code on industrial relations has...
More »If it doesn’t rain -Shweta Saini & Ashok Gulati
-The Indian Express We need a contingency plan that combines real-time technology with robust insurance and easy credit. On April 22, 2015 the Indian Met Department (IMD) released its first forecast for the upcoming monsoon rains, saying it is likely to be below normal, at 93 per cent of the long period average (LPA). Only a week before that, on April 15, a private forecaster, Skymet, had predicted normal rains (102...
More »Housing plan: BPL out, caste census in -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre plans to change the criteria for selecting the beneficiaries of its rural housing scheme for the poor, dropping the earlier poverty-list-based method for one that uses a points system based on the ongoing caste census. The government believes the proposed reform will achieve better targeting by including deserving families left out of the below-poverty-line (BPL) list, but critics feel it would leave a huge number of...
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