-The Hindu Providing people with a modest basic income instead of subsidies would save public revenue With oil prices falling, it was perhaps a good time to fade out fuel subsidies. All subsidies are inefficient and distortionary, and most are regressive. The same could be said of costly public works schemes as well. By contrast, the debate on direct benefit transfers has moved into a more sensible phase, with the posturing criticism of...
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Bengal’s NREGA not a rosy picture -Sumanta Ray Chaudhuri
-The Hindustan Times According to Nabanna sources, a rough average of working days created under MGNREGA in Bengal during the last three years shows that the state ranks a lowly16th among all states on this count. On the basis of the same average during the last three years in terms of working days created during the same period, the figure for Bengal is much lower than the national average. During the period...
More »'Scaling back NREGA would force rural youth to move to bigger cities' -Sameer Arshad
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Mangal Singh's three sons were forced to work as daily wage labourers in Gujarat, hundreds of kilometres from their village in Rajasthan's Ajmer district, before the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was introduced. They were employed there for perilous digging of wells and stayed away from their home for months leaving their 82-year-old father to fend for himself. The NREGA came as a big boon for...
More »Smart agriculture for food security -Rita Sharma
-The Tribune The outlook for all things smart is opening up, including Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). Varanasi, set to develop as a Smart City, will be a lighthouse for sectors seeking sustainable ways to handle demographic pressures, finite environmental resources and climate change. The Finance Minister's budget speech has promised a hundred smart cities. With urban India well covered, it is the turn now of smart agriculture, equipped both to enhance food...
More »Farmer suicides continue unabated -Shoumojit Banerjee
-The Hindu Pune: The unremitting wave of farmer suicides continued in Maharashtra's rain-shadow regions of Marathwada and Vidarbha with four more farmers taking their lives in less than 48 hours, belying feeble government promises of quick succor to afflicted farmers across more than 19,000 villages in the State. According to locals and relatives, the farmers who took the extreme step were small landholders weighed down by massive debt accruing from three consecutive...
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