-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a bid to ensure relief to more than four crore construction workers, the Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre to treat them as formal sector employees by bringing them within the ambit of social welfare laws and provide benefits like paid maternity leave, provident fund and minimum wage. The court directed the Centre to frame a scheme to ensure workers receive proper education,...
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'Digital India' Actually Made MGNREGA Less Transparent -Nikhil Shenoy
-TheWire.in The MGNREGA website used to be something of a gold standard on information dissemination. But not anymore. Sanjay Sahni is an anti-corruption activist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Formally educated only till Class 5, he used to work as an electrician in Delhi until 2012. He came across the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) website by chance, and after several hours of navigating through the complicated web pages, he saw...
More »As Number of Murdered RTI Activists Rises to 67, It Is the Modi Government That Needs to 'Act Rightly' -Venkatesh Nayak
-TheWire.in When conscientious and well-meaning citizens are attacked for "acting rightly", is the government "acting rightly" by not doing enough to safeguard them? Yet another Right to Information (RTI) activist in Gujarat has paid with his life for demanding transparency. On March 9, Nanjibhai Sondarva (35), a resident of Manekvada village in Kotda Sangani taluka of Rajkot district, was allegedly clubbed to death by six people. The deceased’s father has claimed that...
More »Stemming the tide of agrarian distress -Seema Bathla & Ravi Kiran
-The Hindu Rather than just increased budgetary outlays, farmers need plans that will rescue them from crop failure Similar to the last two Budgets, this year’s pro-agriculture intentions are palpable through increased outlays to the agricultural sector and initiation of various programmes. They seem impressive, but closer scrutiny shows that the measures may be of little help to stem the tide of agrarian distress. There are some real challenges confronting three...
More »Hardly a gamechanger -Subrata Mukherjee & Subhanil Chowdhury
-The Hindu Neither the Budget nor the National Health Policy 2017 shows a clear health sector road map The National Health Protection Scheme announced in this year’s Budget has generated a lot of debate. The government has committed itself to “providing coverage up to ?5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation” for 10 crore poor families, with approximately 50 crore people as beneficiaries. As only ?2,000 crore...
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