Four months after Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh requested Comptroller and Auditor General to conduct special audit of Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in highest spending states of the country, CAG officials have started the special audit in Uttar Pradesh. The state gets sanction of about 20 per cent of the yearly Budget of MGNREGA across the country and CAG auditors have started looking into the records and...

A global scramble for land and mineral resources fuelled by billions of investment dollars is threatening the last remaining wilderness and critical ecosystems, destroying communities and contaminating huge volumes of fresh water, warned environmental groups in London Wednesday. No national park, delicate ecosystem or community is off limits in the voracious hunt for valuable metals, minerals and fossil fuels, said the Gaia Foundation’s report, "Opening Pandora's Box". The intensity of the...

  MGNREGA, which entitles millions of workers enrolled under it to at least Rs 100 a day for 100 days of work in a year, is undergoing an overhaul based on a set of recommendations of a committee headed by the Planning Commission member Mihir Shah.   Encapsulated in The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 - Operational Guidelines 2012 in what is being called “MGNREGA 2.0”, the recommendations aim for...

-Pragativadi The extent of the poverty in southern and northern region of Odisha is still high and remains a matter of concern even as the poverty percentage points reduced to 29.69 per cent.  According to the Odisha Economic Survey, 2011-12 report, even after sixty-four years of independence, Odisha has witnessed wide regional and social disparities in development. All regions have not developed uniformly so far. The annual report, which was circulated in the...

Corruption and government apathy may not be hurting MNREGS as much as well-intentioned tinkering There is growing concern that the Centre’s allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) is dropping off. Correspondingly, the average number of days of work created in some of the states is dropping sharply. This decline in the spending of MNREGS money is not a one-off event but has been happening over the...