-Deccan Herald MoF wants more transparency and public involvement For the first time, the government has decided to go for crowdsourcing in the Budget-making exercise and invited suggestions from the public for India’s Budget to be presented in February-March next year. The step has been taken to infuse more transparency into the Budget-making and increase people‘s participation in the mammoth exercise. “In order to infuse more transparency into the Budget-making exercise and to have...

-The Hindu District Mineral Foundations were set up to protect the interests of Adivasi communities who have borne the costs of mining. But they are flawed in their current form Through 2011-13, dogged investigators from the Justice M. B. Shah Commission on illegal mining toured the rust-red villages, forests and rivers of northern Odisha, and trawled through reams of official records including from the environment, minerals, railways, and revenue departments. They met...

-Livemint.com The inclusion of digital tools in the lives of NGOs will not only make them a mass producer of digital content, but will also help make the voices of civil society louder Amid all the negativity about the roles and responsibilities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mostly from the government and in many cases the business sector, one fact that nobody can take away from the non-profits is that theirs is...

-IBNLive.com The Report 'Democracy in India: A Citizen's Perspective' tries to assess people's understanding and perception towards democracy. It is a part of a comparative study (State of Democracy in South Asia) of five South Asian countries that include, besides India - Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The first round of the SDSA was conducted in 2005 and a report based on it was published by Oxford University Press in...

-The Hindu Urban planning that involves the people and alternative service providers gives far better results than top-down efforts from the government, finds an IIT-M study In Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, the responsibility of managing and maintaining a set of more than 160 community toilets was handed over by the Tiruchirapalli City Corporation to a federation of women self-help groups. A post-programme field survey of 803 households revealed that the community participation had...