-Press release by Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee dated 1 February, 2020 The Peoples’ Action for Employment Guarantee is distressed to note the total lack of responsibility and sensitivity accorded by the Union Budget 2020-21 to the rural economy in General, and MGNREGA in particular. It is telling and obviously callous that the Budget estimate for this year at Rs. 61,500 crores is Rs. 9,500 crores less than the revised estimate...
More »SEARCH RESULT
For the rural poor, a manufactured crisis -Rajendran Narayanan
-The Hindu Instead of focusing on increasing rural wages, the BJP-led government is wasting resources on the NPR and NRC The National Population Register (NPR) and a possible National Register of Citizens (NRC), which will unleash a humanitarian crisis, are being pushed at a time when rural distress is acute. With the Budget due soon, let’s look at how the BJP-led government has served the interests of the rural poor. A grim picture The...
More »The minimum wage solution -Rajendran Narayanan & Sakina Dhorajiwala
-The Hindu While indexation of the NREGA wages is critical, lifting them to the minimum wage would help workers and the economy The government made two recent announcements at two ends of the spectrum to mitigate the economic crisis. One concerns a new indexation of NREGA wages meant to increase rural incomes. The second is a reduction in corporate tax rate. Prices of commodities increase each year, so it’s important to accurately estimate...
More »Six reasons why the Economic Survey's presentation of MGNREGA is misleading -Rajendran Narayanan & Rakshita Swamy
-The Hindu The Economic Survey presents an unbalanced view of the technical interventions in MGNREGA A chapter in the recent Economic Survey on the “transformational” impact of Aadhaar on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) merits scrutiny. It presents a skewed and unbalanced view of the programme’s technical interventions instead of taking a comprehensive view of the implementation. The Survey draws heavily from the Indian School of Business’s working...
More »CSOs are unhappy with the way the Economic Survey 2018-19 & the Union Budget 2019-20 dealt with MGNREGA
-Press release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha and Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) dated 9 July, 2019 Even as many parts of the county suffer from drought, the new government at the centre has allocated a mere Rs 60,000 crores for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) for the ongoing financial year. This is Rs 1,084 crore less than the revised budget estimate for 2018-19. Expenditure would have been much...
More »