A nun from Kerala, known for her decade-long agitation that ensured villagers were adequately compensated before a coal mining company was allowed to begin operations, was murdered near her home in Pakur district last night. Sister Valsa John (53) was dragged out from her rented house in Pachuara village, 60km from the district headquarters, around 10.30pm and attacked by a gang with weapons, resulting in her immediate death, said IG Arun...
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Tool of exclusion by Nikhil Dey
The UID in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act may simplify the administrator's task, but will not make a poor man's task any easier. EVERY time there is talk of tinkering with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), it is time we recalled how and why the Act came into existence. The passage of the NREGA was Parliament's response to a people's movement that grew out of the recognition and...
More »TN, AP switch to leaky cash payouts for NREGS by Sandip Das
Tamil Nadu has stopped using banks to pay workers employed under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), turning the clock back on the programme that was expected to eliminate layers of middlemen in reaching money to the poor. Rural development ministry officials at the Centre confirmed the development, but termed it “a temporary setback”. However, Tamil Nadu is not alone. Andhra Pradesh too has asked some of its poorest...
More »Addressing India’s hunger gap by NC Saxena
The word ‘hunger’ does not appear in the 12th Plan Approach Paper even once, whereas according to the latest Global Hunger Index Report, India continues to be in the category of those nations where hunger is ‘alarming’. What is worse, India is one of the three countries where the hunger index between 1996 and 2011 has gone up from 22.9 to 23.7, while 78 out of the 81 developing countries...
More »Massive Digital Divide in the Land of IT by Sujoy Dhar
In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet. But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...
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