The Centre is likely to send a team of experts to Jharkhand to monitor the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) that it believes has been taken over by a contractors’ mafia allegedly behind recent murders of an activist and labourer associated with the job scheme. In an exclusive interview to The Telegraph, Union secretary for rural development B.K. Sinha refused to give out names, but insisted that the...

India missed a unique opportunity to place one of its leading lights in the field at the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as their candidacy was offered too late for the 2005 election, a leaked cable dated July 28, 2004 ( 19191: confidential) from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations has revealed. The names of Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, the driving force behind India's Green Revolution,...

The amounts of various radioactive releases into the environment are unknown, as are the winds and other factors that determine how radioactivity will disperse. The different radioactive materials reported at the nuclear accidents in Japan range from relatively benign to extremely worrisome. The central problem in assessing the degree of danger is that the amounts of various radioactive releases into the environment are now unknown, as are the winds and other...

The government wants to make its rural jobs guarantee programme more open to scrutiny and empower its beneficiaries by getting panchayats (village councils) to periodically disclose information about the scheme’s functioning in that area. To this end, the ministry of rural development has issued an advisory to village panchayats, making it mandatory for them to convene regular gram sabhas (village general bodies). The initiative is also aimed at making the scheme...

Larry Summers, the recently departed Chairman of US President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, posed the following question before his trip to India last November: “What is the self-perception of the Congress as a political party?” In fact, this broad question provokes three specific ones in the domain of economics. Is the Congress the party of Jagdish Bhagwati or Amartya Sen; Nehru or Indira Gandhi; or Aruna Roy or Nandan...