Last year

Barely a month after Sonia Gandhi flagged concerns over shortcomings in the implementation of UPA

The Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said that Madhya Pradesh has maximum number of pro-poor schemes. The state is spending fifty percent of its budget for poverty alleviation. A provision of Rs. 15 crore has been made for organizing Antyodaya Melas so that the poor families get benefits at one place. He was addressing a function at Jamboori ground here today.

The Rural Development Ministry has allowed the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), the apex monitoring agency of the NREGS, to lapse on the completion of its tenure in September last year.

DEVIKA BANERJI NEW DELHI
A funding crisis has hit the government

NEW DELHI, 15 FEB: The absence of programme

Last month, at the IIT-Bombay techfest, Utkarsh, the winners were local, rural and low-cost technologies: Parvin Kumar and Abhishek Ranjan won Rs 50,000 for designing a Rs 32,000 bio-fuel machine that can produce enough gas to cook three meals a day for a family of six.

To ensure proper use of its Rs. 86,553 crore annual rural spending, an ambitious curriculum to train and educate all those involved in the execution of the programmes concerned is on the anvil.

Five years and Rs 75,000 crore later, the Centre has asked states to start a physical trail of expenses incurred under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).

The move comes after the government found out that less than 5 per cent of the total 68.6 lakh works taken up to provide jobs to rural unemployed has been completed to date in the current fiscal.

Even cumulatively, sinc

With no dearth of causes, there