-Economic and Political Weekly One knows who will suffer if the Narendra Modi government succeeds in weakening MGNREGA. The largest public employment programme the world has ever seen is in trouble. In 2013-14, 74 million individuals in 48 million households in rural India were employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act programme (or MGNREGA as it is called), with each household on average finding work for 46 days. This...

-The Indian Express   The NDA government's move to amend the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 in the coming winter session of Parliament has run into rough weather following differences between various government departments over whether government servants and their family members should declare their assets, and whether such information should be made public or not. The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) is learnt to have sided with the bureaucracy in...

-Deccan Herald In accordance with a new agroecology initiative within the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, by using the agroecological methods, small farmers are key to feeding the world, Nafeez Ahmed notes. Modern industrial agricultural methods can no longer feed the world, due to the impacts of overlapping environmental and ecological crises linked to land, water and resource availability. The stark warning comes from the new United Nations Special Rapporteur on the...

-The Business Standard   NC Saxena, a former member of the National Advisory Council believes that the regulatory regime in the states continues to be oppressive. In an e-mailed interview with Aditi Phadnis, Saxena says that the fundamental problem in India is the low tax-GDP ratio and neither the last government nor the current one seems interested in increasing revenues. Edited excerpts: * The new government appears to be watering down a lot...

-GRIST Media If hard work and enterprise inevitably made you prosperous, every rural woman would be a millionaire. These women have borne the brunt of the radical, often brutal transformation of rural India these past two decades. Our writers examine the hardships they continue to face as well as their remarkable vision to solve some of the greatest problems of our times such as food security, environmental justice and developing a...