Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar (TOI March 25 and ET March 28) has strongly defended the Planning Commission's stance that there is nothing amiss with the poverty line drawn at Rs 22.40 in rural areas and Rs 28.65 in urban areas (down from initial estimates of Rs 32 and Rs 26, respectively). Let us discount the copious tears being shed by various politicians and their parties on this new line of poverty...
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Plan to link NREGA to state wage rates
-The Telegraph The wage rate under rural job scheme NREGA could soon be brought on a par with the minimum wages for agricultural labourers fixed by states. The Centre is likely to amend the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) by incorporating a provision saying the wage cannot be less than the minimum rate for agricultural labourers in a particular state. At present, there are discrepancies between the two. A Karnataka...
More »Come April, rural job scheme workers to get more wages
-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...
More »More Benefit than Cost-Alaka M Basu
For women, the NREGA would bring important social gains Not being an expert on the subject and too lazy to read all the fine print, I do not know the exact allocations under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act this year. But I gather the money has been cut down, largely because the sums allocated last year were not fully used by most states. Maybe there were other considerations...
More »Poverty line: Usefulness of poverty data-S Mahendra Dev
The purpose of this piece is not to defend the Planning Commission on poverty figures but to indicate that the methodologies have evolved over time after considerable research and they are useful for policy purposes if not for linking with entitlement programmes (some of us have written earlier that the poor and vulnerable are more numerous than the commission's poverty figures and these should be delinked from entitlement programmes). The commission...
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