Matter begins: What is the impact of the National Rural Employment Guarentee Act on rural wages? That is the question that the pundits are asking today. It's a query which feeds into a larger question. Six years have passed since NREGA became a legal reality. What is its village-level impact? It's a complex question to answer. NREGA undertakes to provide employment to anyone who asks for it. Which makes it...
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The Institutions of Democracy by Andre Beteille
This essay describes and compares Parliament and the Supreme Court and examines the relationship between them. Parliament may still be a great institution, but its members are no longer great men. How long can a great institution remain great in the hands of small men? The SC has held its place in the public esteem rather better than the Lok Sabha, despite the occasional allegation of financial impropriety. Parliament, the...
More »Do Posco differently by Mahtab Alam
Mahtab Alam examines the trouble with the steel project and suggests a way out THE PROPOSED mega Posco project and the anti-Posco movement are back in the news after the violence at the proposed site on 16 July. According to the reports I got, on that day, eight platoons of police attacked and lathicharged peaceful protesters in the village of Nuagaon, Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha. The protesters, despite being mostly women, were...
More »Panel ‘dismayed’ at condition of SCs in Punjab
-The Times of India The National Scheduled Caste Commission on Friday expressed displeasure over diversion of scheduled caste sub-plan funds for general purposes in Punjab. Accompanied by the full commission, its chairman Dr P L Punia said, "As much as 31% of Punjab's total budget outlay should be for the sub-plan as per the commission guidelines, but it could spend only 10.21% and the remaining amount was shifted to general...
More »District NREGA slate too clean; no jobs, no demand, no expense either by Pranav Kulkarni
Pune : The Union Government’s advice to states to suspend employment guarantee activities during peak seasons might just be hours old, but the district administration seems to have implemented that much earlier. If the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) 2005 data on website maintained by the National Informatics Centre is to be trusted, the district has not generated any employment over the past two fiscals — 2009-’10 and 2010-...
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