The government is keen on forging a partnership with IIMs, IITs and other select institutes for augmenting professional resource support to its rural development programmes like NREGA. As part of efforts to evolve such a framework, the Ministry of Rural Development has invited representatives from various professional institutes including IIMs and IITs to participate in a workshop organised by it in Udaipur district of Rajasthan tomorrow, a ministry official said. Union Minister...

The government will have to invest around Rs 5 lakh crore to achieve its target of increasing the higher education enrolment rate from the current 14 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020, a think tank has estimated. The National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) has prepared a concept paper projecting the expected number of youths to be enrolled in higher and technical education by 2020 and the...

The youth will not take no for an answer. Five years on, the RTI comes of age. At four feet something, Santosh’s energy belies her petite frame. The school dropout was introduced to RTI through activist Arvind Kejriwal, and now, at Parivartan’s Sundar Nagri office, she holds fort, helping others acquire everything from BPL and ration cards to school admissions through RTI. Threats and attacks by local authorities who dubbed her...

Aruna Roy , member of National Advisory Council, is in the thick of preparations for a truck yatra and dharna to mobilise people for demands relating to rights of weaker sections and systemic improvement of governance.  Bharat Dogra  spoke to her about the need for this mobilization: The general impression is that Rajasthan has a better record of governance. I agree that Rajasthan has an above-average record in the implementation of NREGS,...

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGA) has been in news mainly due to corruption or inefficiency. The country has spent close to Rs 40,000 crore this fiscal but a large number of urban middle class people and opinion leaders don’t know what to make of it. Cynicism apart, the rights-based scheme has proved to be a game-changer in rural India despite mixed success. The scheme has been relatively...