-The Hindu Business Line Distracted by elections, the country’s alarming water crisis has been overlooked As India’s water crisis gets visibly worse with every passing summer, it is clear that the bureaucracy and policymakers are not working to find immediate and long-term solutions. This time, the apathy seems to have worsened due to the ongoing elections. In Maharashtra and Kerala, for instance, the administrations have taken refuge in the ‘model code of...

-Down to Earth India's villages miss a golden chance to become drought-proof as more MGNREGA projects grind to a halt Almost half of India is currently under drought; for many districts this is the second-consecutive drought. Given this, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) should have been the key scheme to not only mitigate impacts of drought but also employ people in distress for earning. But an analysis of...

-The Hindu If it’s the government’s case that NSSO figures are suspect, what has it based policy decisions on? Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri said last week, “we definitely have a data crisis,” and blamed academics for creating a “false narrative”. Yet, at the heart of the data crisis in India is the Central government, which has been holding back important data. Most recently, it did...

-The Telegraph Rahul cited Sreedhanya’s achievement in Wayanad as evidence that the job scheme was working and took a dig at Narendra Modi Kalpetta (Kerala): The first tribal woman from Kerala to qualify for the IAS told Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday that her parents were beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Sreedhanya Suresh said her parents had educated their two children with the money they earned from the rural...

-Economic and Political Weekly Demand- as well as supply-side factors constrain the labour force participation of rural women. The female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) in India has been one of the lowest among the emerging economies and has been falling over time. This has resulted in a decrease in the ratio of working females to the population of females in the working age group. The FLFPR in India fell from 31.2%...