Alleging that the UP government had failed to provide the prescribed 23% quota to scheduled castes in government services, chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) PL Punia claimed it was also misutilising the funds meant for the dalit. Talking to media on Monday evening, Punia said as per the ratio of the scheduled castes in the total population of the state, a provision had been made to...

The question raises fundamental issues about the MGNREGA’s centralised template and poor delivery mechanism, but it is important to provide a legal basis to its wage structure to protect it against inflation. We need to remember that the way the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was originally conceived, wages were never meant to be equal to the minimum wages; they should have been lower. This is because the...

So why is the UPA hell-bent on killing its unique success story: the NREGA? Here's the inside narrative of the conspiracy. It took 47 days of a protest sit-in at Jaipur to make the state budge(1). It's notable that the objective of this protracted protest was not to coerce the Rajasthan government for an extra share of the state's resources, but to hold the government accountable to the Constitution and its...

For some reason, governments - as well as the development ''industry'' as a whole - have always had a tendency to look for universal panaceas, particular silver bullets that will solve all or most of their implementation problems and somehow achieve the development project for them. The latest such initiative bullet that seems to have been accepted as a silver bullet is the Unique Identification Project, which is now seen...

Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Wednesday submitted the Working Group on Agriculture Production report to Indian Prime Minister in New Delhi. It is to mention that Indian Prime Minster on April 8, 2010 constituted the Working Group on Agriculture Production under the chairmanship of the Haryana Chief Minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda and the Chief Ministers of Punjab, Bihar and West Bengal as members to recommend strategies and action plan...