The Government has revised the wages for unskilled manual workers under the national rural employment guarantee scheme by indexing it to inflation, Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said today. He told the Rajya Sabha during Question Hour that the original National Rural Employment Guarantee Act provides for wages to be indexed to the Consumer Price Index for agricultural labour. Against the Rs 100 per day wages originally approved, actual wages given are...

As per reports received from the States participation of women who got employed under Mahatma Gandhi NREGA is 50% during the current year (2010-11) so far which is well above the minimum prescribed under the Act. The participation by women under the Act was 48% each during 2008-09 and 2009-10. Para 6 of Schedule-II of Mahatma Gandhi NREGA provides that priority shall be given to women in such a way...

Thanks to the Right to Information Act, 2005, and also the activism of NGOs and of the media, a culture of accountability is growing in the country. That is the good news. However, the media, NGOs and RTI activists can only do so much. They can focus the attention of the public and parliamentarians on egregious scams, but rarely address the systemic flaws that result in leakage of funds. We have...

The Government has included small and marginal farmers under Mahatma Gandhi NREGA by an amendment made in para 1(iv) of the list of permissible activities provided in Schedule-I of the Act. The amendment made is as follows: “Provision of irrigation facility, horticulture plantation and land development facilities to land owned by households belonging to the Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes or below poverty line families or to beneficiaries of land...

Among the many reasons cited for India to proceed ahead with the Unique Identification (UID) project -that it will facilitate delivery of basic services, that it will plug leakages in public expenditure and that it will speed up achievement of targets in social sector schemes -   the most specious is perhaps the claim that it will help India reach her public health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite impressive economic growth in...