Emily Esplen visited a community in Dhaka where inspiring community organisers are showing change is possible When I met members of the Dalit Women's Forum in Dhaka last month, they told me about the changes they want to see in their lives and communities. They want their daughters to go to school and stay in school. They want privacy and security when bathing in communal areas. They want health care and...

The Manmohan Singh government is digging an even bigger hole for itself by claiming there was no loss of revenue from the sweetheart sale of 2G spectrum to favoured corporate houses. “Milord,” cunning lawyers have argued in countless Hindi movies, “how can there have been a murder when there is no dead body?” I was reminded of this line when I heard Kapil Sibal — who has been performing as an...

The question raises fundamental issues about the MGNREGA’s centralised template and poor delivery mechanism, but it is important to provide a legal basis to its wage structure to protect it against inflation. We need to remember that the way the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was originally conceived, wages were never meant to be equal to the minimum wages; they should have been lower. This is because the...

As policymakers gear up for their biggest battle against inflation, worrying signs about India’s boom-boom growth story emerged. The first warning signal went up today with the government’s statistical office announcing that the index of industrial production (IIP) — the broadest measure of plant and factory performance —had grown by a piffling 2.7 per cent in November against a market consensus of 6.6 per cent. The index stood at 317.9 —its lowest...

So why is the UPA hell-bent on killing its unique success story: the NREGA? Here's the inside narrative of the conspiracy. It took 47 days of a protest sit-in at Jaipur to make the state budge(1). It's notable that the objective of this protracted protest was not to coerce the Rajasthan government for an extra share of the state's resources, but to hold the government accountable to the Constitution and its...