Eleven years after birth, Jharkhand is still staggering under the oppressive weight of multi-crore land scams — one of the most ignoble pulled off in the capital and the latest unearthed in temple district Deoghar — and it squarely blames Big Brother Bihar for this physical handicap. As many as 82,000 land maps belonging to the state are gathering dust at the Gulzarbag Printing Press in Patna, leaving ample scope for...

The government will recast the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, to give it a welfare edge, following criticism that it was disconnected from people's concern over corruption, high food prices and inflation. The attempt will be to make it more responsive to people's needs and increase earnings of the rural poor. The reform attempts to make the scheme truly demand-based, besides addressing issues of fraud, misuse of funds, corruption...

The Centre’s flagship welfare plan has failed to turn the tide on a key problem: rural migration. The disconcerting admission about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or MNREGA, came in a paper released today by Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on the main challenges facing the programme and the reforms required. Checking distress migration is a key objective of the scheme, other than providing at least 100 days...

The Government has decided to introduce major reforms in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) by bringing under its coverage agricultural activities like sowing, harvesting, soil preparation, irrigation, compost preparation and allied activities relating to livestock. Reforms have been planned to address issues of shortage of labours for agriculture-related activities. The job guarantee scheme will now have a farmers’ friendly face and rechristened as MGNREGA II. The...

IF YOU walked down the streets of Jantar Mantar in New Delhi between 3-5 August, you would see what TV cameras aren’t putting out on primetime news. Thousands of farmers from Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh to Rohtak in Haryana. On protest. Against the systematic grabbing of their land by various state governments across the political spectrum. On one side of the road, on large green carpets, are about 3,000 farmers,...