-The Financial Express   Given that the Mahatma Gandhi National rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is now a decade old, and there have been repeated allegations of it being a breeding ground for corruption, a thorough review of it is called for. Though Nitin Gadkari's plan to limit the scheme to the poorest districts and to change the amount reserved for labour payments did not go down well when he was the...

-The Hindustan Times A United Nations report on Wednesday asked the government to increase focus on rights-based programmes - like the job guarantee and food security schemes - to eradicate poverty while praising PM Narendra Modi's financial inclusion scheme, the Jan Dhan Yojana. The UN report on India and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the central government has cut the budget for social sector schemes and initiated...

-The Tribune In India, mounting demographic pressures are leading to soil degradation. About 17 per cent of the global human and 11 per cent of livestock population is being sustained on a mere 2 per cent of the world's land and 4 per cent of its freshwater resources. The year 2015 has been designated as the International Year of the Soils by the United Nations. Recently, December 5 was commemorated as World...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The NDA government is looking at two possible steps to cut down expenditure on the job guarantee scheme that seeks to provide 100 days of employment a year to every rural household. The rural development ministry is exploring the idea of limiting the scheme to six months instead of a year in about 4,000 blocks that are not covered under intensive implementation. Workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National rural...

-The Hindustan Times Delhi has the dubious distinction of being the world's most polluted city. In fact, the entire country, including the rural areas, is heavily polluted as anyone who has taken a flight in India knows. The fog that engulfs north India in winter is largely a consequence of the smoke particles in the air on which water condenses easily. Why have matters been allowed to reach this state? One...