AMIT KUMAR must be one of the few bankers in the world turning away depositors. The manager of a village bank in the Indian state of Rajasthan, he was reluctant to take a cheque for 1m rupees ($21,200) from the elected head of the village, or sarpanch. The cheque was meant to pay hundreds of villagers for their work under India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which guarantees 100...

In a recent lecture, delivered in Mumbai in memory of Nani Palkhivala, the home minister, P. Chidambaram, attacked “left-leaning intellectuals” and “human rights groups”, who, in his view, “plead the naxalite cause ignoring the violence unleashed by the naxalites on innocent men, women and children”. “Why are the human rights groups silent?” asked the home minister. The short answer is that they aren’t, and haven’t been, silent. There are very...

The United Nations Development Programme-sponsored 2009 Human Development Report on migration, “Overcoming Barriers: Human mobility and Development” has been widely acknowledged as a path-breaking study on human movement. Shattering the many myths around migration, the report concludes that most migration is in fact beneficial, and calls for supporting policies to ease barriers to free movement. Senior Assistant Country Director, UNDP, K. Seeta Prabhu. discusses the report with The Hindu For...

Why would a politician turn cheerleader for those trying to dig dirt against the men and women who form the final but vital link in his political supply chain - the sarpanches or village heads? Perhaps to show his commitment to the government program he owes his job to. This month, Bhilwara in Rajasthan saw something best described as 'social service' meets 'crack investigation': around 1500 people voluntarily gathered and...

The Bhilwara social audit team repeatedly came up against resistance. Yet the coming together of civil society and government in Rajasthan augurs well for the future of NREGA.  For watchers of India’s grassroots democracy, the place to be in recently was Bhilwara in Rajasthan; the town and the countryside were decked out in carnival colours for an audit exercise that saw thousands come together — social rights activists led by...