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...
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A Safety Net, post Covid: We need to provide minimum income for poor and vulnerable -C Rangarajan and S Mahendra Dev
-The Indian Express We need to provide minimum income for poor and vulnerable — cash transfers for women, increasing MGNREGA to 150 days in rural areas, introduction of urban employment guarantee scheme. In the post corona crisis situation, India has to address many problems, of which two stand out. First, the improvement of our healthcare system and second, the need for the institution of a scheme to provide minimum income support to...
More »Diluting Laws Will Mean More Casual Labour – and That's Not a Good Thing -Anjana Thampi and Ishan Anand
-TheWire.in No job contract means lower pay and longer hours. In a desperate bid to encourage investment, several states have made sweeping changes to labour laws over the past month. A number of states have extended the maximum daily work hours from nine to 12, removed the requirement to pay minimum wages, diluted safety norms, restricted the rights of workers to unionise and made it easy for employers to fire workers. While netas...
More »This 2008 law could have given migrants Safety Net for lockdown, but was never implemented -Bhadra Sinha
-ThePrint.in Officials claim the Unorganised Sector Workers’ Social Security Act had some flaws that hampered its implementation, but experts say successive govts slept on it. New Delhi: The thousands of migrant labourers facing a crisis amid the Covid-19 lockdown would have had a Safety Net if a 2008 law providing social protection to unorganised workers had been implemented. But successive governments have failed to do so. The current database with the government shows...
More »The lockdown has highlighted stark inequalities -Zoya Hasan
-The Hindu Instead of embracing the welfare state path, the BJP government is encouraging greater privatisation The novel coronavirus is a global threat, but the pandemic has had an uneven impact across countries and within countries. Historically, social inequality has always been extreme in India. However, the lockdown has sharpened the edges of inequality even further, especially because of the way it has been implemented. Many countries have imposed lockdowns but not...
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