-Newsclick.in The dearth of capital will make a return to normalcy difficult for ostagars even when there will be a visible improvement and the authorities muster courage to lift all the restrictions. Kolkata: “We are passing through the worst phase in our 17 years old enterprise BabyGarments.in and we have no clue when we will see the first signs of revival”. This is how a middle-aged woman entrepreneur and proprietor of BabyGarments,...
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An invisible humanitarian crisis in India -Harsh Mander
-The Hindu The state and the rich and middle classes remain indifferent as millions slip into chronic hunger and intense poverty India’s labouring poor have largely disappeared even from the inner pages of newspapers and from television screens. It is as though, after the country has gradually unlocked and most migrants have returned home, the wrenching distress of mass hunger and sudden unemployment that racked their lives has somehow passed. The reality...
More »MGNREGA work demand drops in July 2020 as labourers get jobs in farms -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-Business Standard Despite the drop, however, demand is almost 71% more than July 2019 After seeing a surge in May and June, demand for work under Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) tapered a bit in July as casual labourers returned to work in farms for sowing kharif crops. However, demand was still much higher compared to the previous years, underlining the scheme’s vital role in providing employment to the rural poor,...
More »Can raising the approved labour budget from 280.76 crore person-days to 306.6 crore person-days help the unskilled returnee migrants who prefer MGNREGA to Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan?
Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...
More »Reset rural job policies, recognise women’s work -Madhura Swaminathan
-The Hindu As India emerges from the lockdown, labour market policy has to reverse the pandemic’s gender-differentiated impact The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on women’s work, but as official statistics do not capture women’s work adequately and accurately, little attention has been paid to the consequences of the pandemic for women workers and to the design of specific policies and programmes to assist them. A survey by the Azim Premji...
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