-The Business Standard Railway engineers would help gram panchayats in developing estimates of the work and in training workers Union Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal today announced a partnership between Indian Railways and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in his budget speech. "I thank (Minister of Rural Development) Jairam Ramesh for agreeing to the railways' request to partner in some of the rail-related activities under MGNREGS," he said. Bansal...
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Forget job card, bring rooster for MGNREGA wages-Sheikh Saleem
-Rising Kashmir Srinagar: The criterion for laborers getting wages with Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Bandipora villages is not a job card but a rooster. “Even if you have worked efficiently, you will be paid wages only if you have a desi rooster to gift the officials,” locals from various Bandipora villages said. Alleging corruption in the release of funds, people from Zaban Chuntimulla said authorities were not releasing...
More »Work in Progress-SL Rao
-The Telegraph The world lauds us as the largest democracy. Yet, how much of a democracy are we and where must we improve? Elections and their consequences: We have regular elections. They are supervised with increasing effectiveness as far as booth capturing, bogus voters and violence are concerned. The influence of money has not waned; if anything, it has increased. It is not as it used to be, for paying voters only....
More »Displaced and damned for a generation -Alok Deshpande
-The Hindu Koynanagar (Maharashtra): First, a dam, then an earthquake and finally a tiger reserve — families in Satara district’s Koyna have been displaced thrice in one generation. In 1960, the people had to move, paving the way for the Koyna dam; in 1967 following the earthquake and then for the Koyna tiger reserve in 1985, says Jagannath Vibhute, an activist of the Shramik Mukti Dal and one of the many...
More »Development minus green shoots-TR Shankar Raman and MD Madhusudan
-The Hindu By exempting some projects on forest land from gram sabha consent, the government has undermined the rights of local communities and their crucial role in protecting the environment In early February, the Ministry of Environment and Forests partially revoked a crucial order it had issued in August 2009, which made the consent of gram sabhas mandatory for projects seeking diversion of forest lands for non-forest purposes. Now, the ministry has...
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