Ekka, who is embroiled in the controversy for allegedly signing official documents at a private place, was removed from the post following Bharatiya Janata Party's allegation of his conniving with middlemen.
Less than nine per cent of Chhattisgarh households got jobs for 100 days under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act during 2007-08 to 2011-12, a Comptroller and Auditor General report tabled in the assembly on Wednesday said.
"Prime Minister Modi is not a leader, he is an actor. It would have been better if Amitabh Bachchan was made the prime minister," she said at an election meeting at the end of her roadshow in Mirzapur.
Jharkhand mining secretary Pooja Singhal, earlier arrested and remanded to the custody of the ED in a suspected money laundering case, was suspended by the Jharkhand government on Thursday, an official said.
'Usually, urban wage rates are 50 per cent higher than rural wage rates. But, this could be narrowing very rapidly now,' points out Mahesh Vyas, CEO, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.
A good agricultural harvest and a timely arrival of monsoon, besides a slew of government schemes, have also come as a bounty.
'UBI is a tricky subject.' 'Our worry is the government could get rid of UPA's social welfare schemes targeted at the poor.'
The incident took place on Wednesday afternoon in Demchok sector, located 250 km east of Leh, where the work for linking a village with 'hot spring' was being undertaken under the MNREGA.
'Farmers love cows but find it uneconomical to afford fodder expenses'
Singh Deo will, however, remain the minister for Health and Family Welfare, Medical Education, Twenty Point Implementation and Commercial Tax departments.
Leader of Opposition in Kerala Assembly Ramesh Chennithala demanded a judicial probe into the circumstances that led to opening of shutters of 40-odd dams at a time in the state.
The praise comes a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi termed it a 'monument of UPA's failures'.
Market linking of petrol and diesel prices has helped the industry.
The centre pays only an insulting Rs 200 per pensioner each month at a tight-fisted 0.04 per cent of GDP, among the lowest in the world. Instead, as illustrated by Jean Drze, one option is for NYAY to provide individual rather than household entitlements to all pensioners of at least Rs 1200 per month.
'Increased allocations for MNREGA could have provided the much needed push to rural demand and consumption at a time when recovery continues to remain uneven.'
It is clear Modi wants to establish a direct hotline with the bureaucracy, bypassing the ministers, just like in Gujarat where the bureaucracy ran the show and the babus were given a free hand to take decisions.
As the world awaits the end of the global pandemic, rural Bengal might be witnessing a recession unfolding in bits and pieces. With factories and tea gardens closing down, agricultural income falling and storm Aila ravaging a large part of deltaic West Bengal in 2010, migration gradually became a norm.
Slamming the Bharatiya Janata Party for its "politics of India Shining," Rahul Gandhi on Thursday reached out to the poor and rural youths in Bundelkhand, hard-selling the United Progressive Alliance's flagship schemes of food security, land acquisition and job guarantee programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.
'If because of El Nino, the monsoon is affected adversely in the current year, naturally it will affect income projections and consequently Budget numbers.'
India's rural employment guarantee programme MNREGA has been ranked as the world's largest public works programme, providing social security net to almost 15 per cent of the country's population, the World Bank has said.
Timely onset of south-west monsoon is crucial for kharif (summer) crops.
In other welfare schemes, such as those for cooking gas, pension and scholarships, which are linked to DBT, cash is transferred directly into the bank accounts of beneficiaries.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a new job creation scheme by giving subsidy to those establishments that make new hires. The subsidy would be to cover for retirement fund contributions by employees as well as employers for two years, she said. Employees contribution (12 per cent of wages) and employer's contribution (12 per cent of wages) totalling 24 per cent of wages would be given to establishments for two years, she said. Under the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana, every Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO)-registered establishment taking new employees would get this subsidy.
Of the cash outgo, Rs 64,598 crore is for enhanced expenditure on fertiliser subsidy under Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan 3.0 and Rs 20,466 crore for the capital outlay in defence services.
Had Finance Minister Sitharaman thought a little more about the middle class, disadvantaged sections, and the poor who are struggling, it would have been an inclusive Budget that would have made history, notes Ramesh Menon.
Here are the key highlights of the BJP's 'Sankalp Patra' for the 2024 parliamentary polls.
Though people from relief camps have started returning to their homes, more than 10.40 lakh people were still in 2,770 camps across the state.
On Gandhi Jayanti, she also invoked the Father of the Nation, to assail the government which, she claimed, swears by his name but demolishes his ideals through its actions.
The government is doing things in agriculture that count for little, says Shreekant Sambrani.
EPFO has verified or attested 64.67 lakh Aadhaar numbers.
The new government may enhance the Plan expenditure for 2014-15 by around Rs 11,000 crore (Rs 110 billion) in the Budget next month, which would be about 2 per cent higher than what was provided in the previous fiscal budget.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a Rs 11.11 lakh crore spending on infrastructure and vowed to continue reforms as she resisted resorting to populist measures in Modi government's last Budget before general elections, instead choosing to stay on the path of cutting deficit while bolstering measures for focus groups.
The focus is likely to be on consolidation and improvement of existing rural-centric programmes to ensure their completion ahead of the next general elections in 2019, rather than announcement of new schemes. Sanjeeb Mukherjee and Arup Roychoudhury report.
Five days after the induction of 18 ministers into his cabinet, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Sunday allocated portfolios, keeping Urban Development and 11 other ministries with himself, while giving the crucial Home Department to Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis.
The plan includes step-wise expansion of a crucial credit guarantee net, establishment of an unprecedented number of functional clusters and increased government procurement from MSMEs.
For states like West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, where migration is high, the return of workers could be as much an opportunity as a liability. All states have launched portals to register migrant workers; additional fields like nature of employment and remuneration in the past 2-3 years are being added to help in skill mapping.
'The prospects for both India and the global economy is that we are headed towards a very difficult time.' 'I see very uncertain at least 8-10 months for both India and the rest of the world.'
The BJP would want that by March 2022, when UP votes, the economy starts looking up and it heads into the polls with no other issue distracting from its main poll plank of the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
'I'll survive for a month, but worry about what will happen if the lockdown isn't eased after that.'
We can hope that some of the benefits of the rural spending - on irrigation, roads, etc -- will spur rural demand and improve rural productivity, says P V Subramanyam.
