-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Indian Express This year's edition of the Human Development Report contains a set of practical recommendations The 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) draws attention to the urgent need to address human vulnerabilities and build resilience as conditions for accelerating and sustaining progress. Human insecurity stems from not only low and uncertain incomes, but from many other sources, including inadequate access to health, food and shelter, unsafe environments, and inadequate protection of...

-The Hindu SAGE has raised demand to declare Mysore a GMO-Free City Mysore: Being a region where organic and natural farming is popular, activists called for declaring Mysore a GMO-Free City (Genetically Modified Organism-Free City) more than three years ago. The Southern Action on Genetic Engineering (SAGE) had raised the demand for a ‘GMO-Free Mysore' in keeping with Mysore's heritage character. The activists had argued that just as the built heritage of a city...

-The Hindu Kolkata: Twenty-five children suffering from severe malnutrition and low weight from the five closed tea gardens of north Bengal have been admitted to State-run hospitals in Jalpaiguri district. Twenty-five children suffering from severe malnutrition and low weight from the five closed tea gardens of north Bengal have been admitted to State-run hospitals in Jalpaiguri district. All the children are below five years of age and from the tea gardens which...

-Outlook Over 20 per cent of food items served in restaurants and fast food outlets across the country have been found to be substandard or adulterated, according to government data. Out of 46,283 food samples including milk, milk products, edible vegetable oil and spices tested at various government laboratories during 2013-14, as many as 9,265 samples were found to be adulterated and misbranded. Uttar Pradesh reported the highest number of such cases in...