After questions were raised recently on the ''leakages'' in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), another concern – non-payment of salaries to social auditors in Karnataka –might well have broad implications for the programme in the State. For the past six months, the social auditors who are responsible for supervising, guiding, rectifying errors in the programme’s implementation, and motivating people to take up more and jobs under the...

A year before assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Planning Commission has ranked the state poorly on performance of 12 major flagship schemes of the Central government. The new analysis is likely to provide Congress ammunition against the Mayawati government on UP for not been able to utilize the Central government funds effectively. The new ranking, which is the part of annual state plan report for 2011-12, finds UP at the bottom...

“Government can no longer convince people its hands are clean” A former Union Revenue Secretary, E.A.S. Sarma, has accused the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) of turning a “blind eye” to his repeated warnings about “alleged irregularities” committed in auditing capital costs and allowing price and other concessions to the Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) in the KG basin and Cairn India in Rajasthan. In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Manmohan...

India’s fiscal policy is not supportive of monetary measures that the country’s central bank is employing to fight rampant inflation, the prime minister’s honorary economic advisor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist Raghuram Rajan said, while singling out the proposed Food Security Bill as a particular cause for concern. The Bill, which proposes to give about 68 per cent of population the legal right to subsidised food, will not only...

-Express News Service   The Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) will conduct the screening examinations for Class VI from July 10, after having delayed the exams for almost six months while they secured an exemption from the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education that prohibits screening tests for admission to schools. “Because of this confusion, we have already delayed our examinations. We are under the specified category, and hence exempt from...