Once covered with lush teak forests, Pati block in Badwani district of Madhya Pradesh now has a depressing lunar landscape of denuded hills, where only subsistence agriculture is possible. Most rural households there survive on wage labour and seasonal migration.
CONTRACTORS are banned for work under the NREGA, but the survey found that they were in fact involved at 27 per cent of the sample worksites. The worst State in this respect was Jharkhand, where contractors were found at more than half (57 per cent) the sample worksites.
The NREGA is a piece of new-age legislation which invokes the framework of legal rights to provide employment in rural areas. The rights framework should, ideally, provide an antidote to government irresponsibility in the form of accountability under the law.
NREGA Survey 2008 was conducted in May-June 2008. It covered 10 districts spread over six North Indian States (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh). The sample districts were Araria and Kaimur (Bihar), Surguja (Chhattisgarh), Koderma and Palamau (Jharkhand), Badwani and Sidhi (Madhya Pradesh), Dungarpur and Sirohi (Rajasthan) and Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh).
Four years after the 2004 tsunami, a look at the reconstruction and rehabilitation work that has been carried out.
Permanent houses for tsunami victims built by the Development Promotion Group (DPG), a Chennai-based NGO, at Vanavanmahadevi village in Nagapattinam district.
A week before the launch it looked like the most unlikely place to house the all-important Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) for the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter mission. The ISSDC is intended to be, according to the website of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO),
