Indian Polity&Constitution Quiz:Civil Society and Social Audit|22 Jan, 2021

In April 2017, Meghalaya became the first State in the country to pass social audit legislation, the Meghalaya Community Participation and Public Services Social Audit Act. This Act mandated social audits across 21 schemes and 11 departments.
Source: The Hindu

Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), 2010
•Foreign funding of voluntary organizations in India is regulated under FCRA act which is implemented by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
•The Acts ensures that the recipients of foreign contributions adhere to the stated purpose for which such contribution has been obtained.
•Under the Act, organisations are required to register themselves every five years.
Source: The Hindu

NGOs are groups of ordinary citizens that are involved in a wide range of activities that may have charitable, social, political, religious or other interests.
•NGOs are helpful in implementing government schemes at the grassroots.
•In India, NGOs can be registered under a plethora of Acts such as the Indian Societies Registration Act, 1860, Religious Endowments Act, 1863, Indian Trusts Act, etc.
Source: Governance in India by Laxmikanth

The SHG Bank Linkage Project launched by NABARD in 1992 has blossomed into the world’s largest microfinance project.
NABARD along with RBI permitted SHGs to have a savings account in banks from the year of 1993. This action gave a considerable boost to the SHG movement and paved the way for the SHG-Bank linkage program.
Source: Governance in India by Laxmikanth

Kudumbashree was launched in Kerala in 1998 to wipe out absolute poverty through community action.
•It is the largest women empowering project in the country.
•It has three components i.e., microcredit, entrepreneurship and empowerment.
•It has three tier structure – neighborhood groups (SHG), area development society (15-20 SHGs) and Community development society (federation of all groups).
•Kudumbashree is a government agency that has a budget and staff paid by the government. The three tiers are also managed by unpaid volunteers.
Source: The Hindu

The report has been developed by NITI Aayog, with technical assistance from the World Bank, and in consultation with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
It ranks states and Union territories innovatively on their year-on-year incremental change in health outcomes, as well as, their overall performance with respect to each other.
Source: The Hindu

A key component of e-governance is to provide governments with a citizen-friendly face. Naturally, G2C (government-to-citizens) is an important element of all e-governance projects.
•FirstGov in the US, e-Envoy of the UK, e-Taiwan, e-Citizen in Singapore, e-Korea, e-Malaysia, Victoria Online in Australia and Government Online in Canada are award-winning G2C services in the world.
•Closer home, e-Seva in Andhra Pradesh, Friends in Kerala, Sukhmani centres in Punjab, the Lok-Mitra project in Rajasthan, Coimbatore-Online in Tamil Nadu and BangaloreOne in Karnataka are some of the pioneering G2C initiatives in India.
Source: The Hindu

India’s richest 1% hold more than four-times the wealth held by 953 million people who make up for the bottom 70% of the country’s population, while the total wealth of all Indian billionaires is more than the full-year budget.
•Releasing the study Time to Care, ahead of the 50th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), rights group Oxfam also said the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 per cent of the planet’s population.
•The report flagged that global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade, despite their combined wealth having declined in the last year.
Source: The Hindu

India’s MMR has declined from 130 per 1 lakh live births in 2014-2016 to 122 per 1 lakh live births in 2015-2017 as per the recently released Sample Registration System (SRS) 2015-2017 bulletin for MMR. A decline of 8 points (6.2%) has been observed.
•The bulletin categorizes the country into three groups: Empowered Action Group (EAG), Southern States and other states.
•The following states are comes under EAG are Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Rajasthan.
Source: The Hindu

As per the Constitutional provision under Article 244 (1) of the Constitution of India, the ‘Scheduled Areas’ are defined as ‘such areas as the President may by order declare to be Scheduled Areas’ – as per paragraph 6(1) of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution of India.
The criteria for declaring any area as a “Scheduled Area” under the Fifth Schedule are:
•Preponderance of tribal population,
•Compactness and reasonable size of the area,
•A viable administrative entity such as a district, block or taluk, and
•Economic backwardness of the area as compared to the neighbouring areas.
These criteria are not spelt out in the Constitution of India but have become well established. Accordingly, since the year 1950 to 2007 Constitutional Order relating to Scheduled Areas has been notified.
Source: Ministry of Tribal Welfare