The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme completes five years this year. A week before the budget, CNBC TV18's Gopika Gopakumar travels to the interiors of Maharashtra to find out how the NREGA scheme is getting implemented. Pandurni village, in Nanded District of Maharashtra, is in high spirits. It has won the award for best performance in implementing the rural employment guarantee scheme for 2009-10. Around 1,500 people from this village are registered...

Street children collecting garbage scattered on roads near Sunderpur-Bazardiha area. The schoolchildren in the area celebrating Saraswati Puja on Tuesday. The two pictures in contrast reveal the sorry state of affairs when it comes to education for the underprivileged kids. The provisions of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which came into force on April 1, 2010, call for free and compulsory education to children between 6 to 14 years...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

A courier company in Mumbai shows the way in providing employment for the hearing impaired. IN the milling crowds of Mumbai, they stand apart with their orange T-shirts printed with the name Mirakle Couriers. Every day, during the busy hours of the working week, one sees them on the sidewalks, in public transport and elsewhere with large black bags slung on their shoulders. It would not be enough to say...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...