-The Pioneer Hitting at UPA’s biggest flagship scheme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Agriculture Ministry has criticised the scheme in it’s first ever Agriculture Survey saying that MGNREGA has led to double digit growth in wages annually in the last few years even exceeding the rate of inflation that prevailed during this period. The Agriculture Survey is compiled by the Agriculture Ministry as a precursor to Union Budget on...

Women and impoverished, illiterate tribals fall prey to Madhya Pradesh’s overweening family planning zeal Birth Control 1951 Family planning as a policy is launched in independent India 1978 Rechristened Family Welfare after the emergency 2000 National Population Policy aims at stable population by 2045 2010 Madhya Pradesh launches targeted family planning NPP says sterilisation should be last resort in family planning. *** When Shyam Lal* walked into a primary health centre at Rewa, a dusty little town in...

At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive. The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age. When she was first brought to...

Corruption and government apathy may not be hurting MNREGS as much as well-intentioned tinkering There is growing concern that the Centre’s allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) is dropping off. Correspondingly, the average number of days of work created in some of the states is dropping sharply. This decline in the spending of MNREGS money is not a one-off event but has been happening over the...

Faulty procurement, rising farm inputs force West Bengal farmers to commit suicide LONG known as farmer friendly, West Bengal is now making headlines for farmers’ suicides. Reportedly 31 farmers, including landless farm labourers and small traders of agriculture produce, in the state took their lives between October last year and January. Twenty-one of the 31 deaths are from the state’s rice bowl Burdwan district. And this is probably a reason the spate...