-The Indian Express Modi on July 5 made clear his intention to retain and push the schemes. In a decisive push to the UPA government's Aadhaar project and Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, his office has directed the Planning Commission to collect data on these schemes in 300 priority districts and submit a status report by August 15. According to government sources, the directive was issued...

-The Hindu   Unlike the success story of the tea stall owner who became Prime Minister, there are many others whose dreams have been forgotten. But their lives have been rebuilt by MGNREGA Right next to the village home in Devdungri, Rajsamand, Rajasthan where I lived and worked with Mazdoor Kisan Shakthi Sangathan from 1998, live Chiman Singh and his wife Meera. Both of them used to migrate to Ahmedabad for six months...

-The Hindu   India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised...

-The Financial Express MGNREGA must be tweaked in implementation, not design. Before his tragic demise, the Union minister for rural development, Gopinath Munde, gave a clear indication of the new government's priorities on MGNREGA. Both these priorities are vital: using the programme for the creation of productive assets to combat drought and poverty and ensuring timely payment of wages. More than two decades of liberalisation and high economic growth have left India...

-The Hindu     Filmmakers Kavita Bahl and Nandan Saxena on their award-winning documentary "Candles in the Wind" which chronicles the struggles of the widows of the Green Revolution in Punjab As calls for a ‘second green revolution' begin to be heard, it is important to examine the legacy of the first. In Punjab, the laboratory of the revolution, the experiment seems to have gone wrong - water tables have declined, agriculture has become...