In an interaction with BW’s Rajeev Dubey, Professor S. Mahendra Dev argues why our inclusive growth is far from ‘inclusive’

Both UPA I and UPA II have had identical social objectives: enormously expensive subsidy-laden programmes that began with job guarantee through MGNREGA and have since expanded to free education, food security and now universal healthcare.

Rural areas have shown a faster pace of decline as poverty levels dipped by over seven percentage points in the past five years in the country. As per Planning Commission estimates released on Monday, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Uttarakhand are among the top performers, with the decline in poverty in each of these states estimated at 10 percentage points or more between 2004-05 and 2009-10.

The time has come to supplement the employment guarantee scheme with a food security strategy. And if we don’t do it now, we probably will not do so for a long time. As the economist Gunnar Myrdal argued, a lot of “scientific” economic and social reasoning is thinly disguised value prejudices and it is, in important matters, more honest and in fact necessary to explicate your values. Having said that, the debate on food security is taking strange turns, both from critics and proponents.

The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre if it was willing to consider opening its purse strings to pay higher wages to agricultural labourers employed under its flagship job guarantee scheme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). The thought got provoked after the Karnataka High Court on September 23, 2011 ruled that under the Central scheme, the agricultural workers should be entitled to minimum wages fixed by the State Government, in this case being `119 per day in Karnataka. This was not acceptable to the Centre which had capped the daily wages at `100.

Farmers who had given land for a factory of the West Bengal Pharmaceutical and Phytochemical Development Corporation nearly two decades ago demanded that the utilised plot be given to them for growing crops. Today, around 200 people gathered under the banner of the Congress’ farmers’ wing and demanded that a manufacturing unit be set up in the entire area within a month or the land returned to them.

New Delhi: Farmer suicides and the agrarian crisis have been the reason for many disruptions in Parliament, but when the time comes to discuss the issue, hardly anyone bothers to attend, as happened in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday when not even 60 MPs were present. In fact, there were probably just 50 of them.

In the first high-level red-flag against the UPA government’s flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that while assets created under the NREGA “may or may not have productive use”, the programme was “adversely” impacting the agriculture sector by “drawing out agriculture labourers from agricultural operations”.

May Be A Front To Acquire Tribal Land: Cong MLA
Raipur: Six months ago, a TOI report exposed how Chhattisgarh home minister Nankiram Kanwar’s son, Sandeep Kanwar, acted as a front and bought tribal land illegally for a power company — benami deals that were struck down by the district collector. It turns out that the home minister’s son may not be the only “front”.