-The Hindu   Minimum wages to unorganised workers The draft labour policy, released by Labour Minister Shibu Baby John here on Tuesday, proposes measures to ensure minimum wages to workers in the unorganised sector and check unhealthy tendencies such as ‘nokkukooli' in the loading and unloading sector. Releasing the policy, the Minister said that no time frame had been fixed for achieving these objectives because attitudes needed to be changed. All trade unions had...

Monija Khatun has not got her salary as ad-hoc teacher for 17 months, youth in Soliya village in Jharkhand have got no work under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) for the last five months and half of the newly constructed wells have collapsed in another village. These are just a few stories from a Naxal affected district of Jharkhand, where people feel alienated from the development process, even...

Members of Parliament, cutting across party lines, have demanded an increase in the wages and workdays of the beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the UPA government, so as to insulate them from the galloping inflation. The demands were made by the members, including those of the ruling Congress-led ruling coalition, at a meeting of the parliamentary consultative committee on the...

Government is expected to unveil new guidelines for its flagship rural employment scheme, which will have a special focus on naxal-affected areas and stress on skill development. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said the new guidelines will give authorities greater flexibility in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. Addressing a meeting of Parliamentary Consultative Committee on MGNREGA here, Ramesh said complaints have come mainly from states like...

State governments have been asked to roll out the model in which payments would be made through bio-metric authentication at the village level For speedy disbursal of payments to workers under the flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the ministry of rural development has decided to introduce the business correspondence model, to be followed by banks. State governments have been asked to roll out the model in which payments...