-The Hindu   Investment in a scheme that guarantees rural employment with minimum wages should be seen as complementary and not alternative to development activities A recent paper by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has argued that the "push" factors of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are not as important as the economic growth "pull" factors, for increasing agricultural wages. The paper has received wide media...

-The Hindustan Times The UPA government intends to put the world's biggest job guarantee programme - MGNREGA - on its "game-changer" money transfer platform - the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) from this October. That would happen if the government agencies are able to provide unique identification or Aadhaar numbers to entire population in 51 districts, where the government intends to put MGNREGA under DBT mode, and the banks and posts offices come...

-The Times of India The new office will give real time analysis of the government's social programmes, says Jairam Ramesh At a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is facing flak for a series of alleged corruption scams, the ministry of rural development that has an annual budget of approximately ` 800 billion has decided to go ahead and create an office of concurrent evaluation. The proposal for a...

-The Economic Times The revised, but not yet passed, National Food Security Bill (NFSB) represents a crucial political-economic approach to welfare. But how well do we understand the financial and, more importantly, distributional consequences of the revised Bill? Although the revised Bill is likely to simplify the identification of beneficiaries, financial implications will still be substantial. Calculating these implications must include not only the cost of food subsidy, but also additional costs...

-The Hindu In the eye of the storm for funding corporate warehousing projects on terms far softer than those offered to Poor farmers, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is now blaming the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for the transgressions. Following a story in The Hindu, (‘As farmers suffer, NABARD offers soft loans to corporates, ' December 10, 2012), NABARD came under...