-The Hindu Business Line MNREGA Act may be amended to end present disparity From April 1, wage rates under the UPA's flagship MGNREGA will be revised upwards across the country. The wages are now linked to the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labour (CPI-AL). A notification to this effect is being issued for the period April 1 to March 31, 2013, the Rural Development Minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh, informed the Lok Sabha on...
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Wage rate under MGNREGA revised-K Balchand
The Centre on Monday revised the wage rate under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and has decided to amend the Act to remove the existing disparity in minimum wage, even as the matter is scheduled to come up before the Supreme Court on April 9. The revision in the wage rate indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labour (CPIAL) will come into effect on April 1...
More »Higher NREGA payouts stoking inflation fears
The wages under the government's flagship rural employment scheme have risen following adjustments for price rise, creating apprehension that this may add to the inflationary pressures by making farming more expensive. The government had early last year benchmarked wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to retail inflation to ensure a real wage of Rs 100 a day to workers seeking employment under the scheme. Under the first such...
More »Poverty falls, but inequality worsens-Anil Padmanabhan
There are two messages, one good, the other, bad, in the latest poverty numbers released by the government. The good news first. It is obvious that poverty has declined in aggregate terms, both in rural and urban India. At a national level, it has declined by 7.4 percentage points from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10; rural poverty, over the same period, has declined from 41.8% to 33.8%, and urban...
More »'Rural jobs scheme should have off period during agriculture season'
-IANS States should be allowed to declare an off period for the rural jobs scheme MGNREGA during peak agricultural season, says Sumitra Mahajan, chief of a parliamentary panel on rural development. She also believes extending the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to urban areas - as suggested by the Economic Survey last week - is not practicable unless the scheme is made to include semi-skilled work apart from manual...
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