Extreme poverty and clamour for firewood have forced some people in Nayagram into extreme occupations. One such is gathering kolmipoka, an insect with medicinal value After walking almost 30km along rutted roads since the morning, middle-aged Bonchu Nayek returns to his humble home, a two-room hut, as darkness descends on Nayagram—one of West Bengal’s poorest villages—with his day’s earning of Rs10. Nayek, whose forefathers were hunters, belongs to the Lodha-Sabar tribe. With...

Sometime this month, Justice N Ramamohana Rao of the Andhra Pradesh High Court will deliver a verdict that will directly impact earnings of the 114 million people who work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the Central government's work guarantee programme. The verdict will also indirectly impact earnings of the 400 million workers and labourers who toil in India's factories and fields for 'minimum wages'. The question Justice Rao...

A review of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) implementation in the state revealed "poor performance" by the Congress government, according to North East Social Trust (NEST), an NGO. With barely two days left for the state to go for the first phase of assembly polls, a study conducted by NEST, found that out of 3,749,672 household provided with job cards under MGNREGA, a staggering 24,36,848 households did...

An evaluation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in the State has found several shortcomings in the implementation including corruption, inefficiency and lack of awareness about the programme. The draft of the evaluation, conducted by two researchers of the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) has found that while the rules stipulate that each worker entitled to get 100 Days of Employment under the scheme should have...

The Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) activists staged a protest here on Wednesday to vent their dissent at the Central Government over the poor implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Scores of persons took part in the demonstration, which was led by LJP President Ram Vilas Paswan and the head of the party’s Punjab state unit Jay Singh. Jay Singh said that they have sought from the Central Government...