A barbed wire fence put up on Government land dividing two different groups of Dalits for nearly a decade in Santhaiyur village near Peraiyur was removed by the Madurai Rural district police on Wednesday. A section of people belonging to one of the Scheduled Castes had erected stone pillars and fenced the poromboke land for about 30 feet with barbed wires to “prevent the people of other group entering the land...

Ludhiana : Despite the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA) assuring employment for 100 days to the villagers, the project is not finding many takers in Ludhiana district. In fact, the authorities are finding it so hard to find workers that they have now planned to focus more to enrol women as workers. While the Act stipulates that a worker will get Rs 150 as daily wage, in the open...

-The Economic Times It was just a ride in a cycle rickshaw that moved an Assam based veterinary surgeon, Dr Pradip Kumar Sarmah and got him thinking into setting up the concept of 'Rickshaw Bank'. The concept today has changed the lives of more than 10000 rickshaw pullers in six states in India. Dr Pradip Kumar Sarmah (47), the innovator of this concept, explained that majority of the rickshaw pullers drive rented...

Online cards issued under the government's flagship rural jobs scheme will now include the beneficiary's 12-digit 'Aadhar' number issued under the Centre's multi-crore unique ID project that has drawn more brickbats than bouquets.  Over the next three months, state governments will update the registration data, including Aadhar numbers, of beneficiaries under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in an exercise to weed out ghost cards.  "This will help us assess...

-The Business Standard The Ministry of Rural Development has rejected the demand of a parliamentary standing committee to include the works of artisans, weavers and leather workers in the list of permissible works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The Central Employment Guarantee Council, constituted under the legislation establishing the rural jobs scheme to oversee it, had earlier turned down this recommendation of the standing committee on urban and...