For women, the NREGA would bring important social gains   Not being an expert on the subject and too lazy to read all the fine print, I do not know the exact allocations under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act this year. But I gather the Money has been cut down, largely because the sums allocated last year were not fully used by most states. Maybe there were other considerations...

-The Times of India   Barkatullah University will have a separate counter to accept cash from RTI applicants seeking information related to BU issues soon. The facility will save RTI applicants from paying more Money, the university registrarsaid. The decision came a day after the TOI carried a story on how RTI applicants are forced to cough up Rs 27 for a photo copy because the university doesn't accept cash and insists on...

About a year since the hailstorm and subsequent high-vaulted promise of compensation by the state government, hundreds of farmers continue to wait for the succour. The storm wiped out their hope of paying off private and government-sector debt and keeping the kitchen running. The wheat was ready for harvest in 23 villages of Moga district when rain took a toll on it. The revenue department assessed the loss but there's no...

The purpose of this piece is not to defend the Planning Commission on poverty figures but to indicate that the methodologies have evolved over time after considerable research and they are useful for policy purposes if not for linking with entitlement programmes (some of us have written earlier that the poor and vulnerable are more numerous than the commission's poverty figures and these should be delinked from entitlement programmes).  The commission...

Consumption-based measures don’t accurately estimate poverty Since the publication of poverty estimates purportedly based on the Tendulkar methodology and the 2009-10 consumption survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), many in Parliament and outside, from different political parties, have questioned its conclusions. Concomitantly, media reactions have speculated on poverty’s relationship with fertility, growth, specific schemes, et al. But, India’s poverty, like itself, refuses to classify itself in simple boxes. Beyond the...