-The Financial Express MGNREGA must be tweaked in implementation, not design. Before his tragic demise, the Union minister for rural development, Gopinath Munde, gave a clear indication of the new government's priorities on MGNREGA. Both these priorities are vital: using the programme for the creation of productive assets to combat drought and poverty and ensuring timely payment of wages. More than two decades of liberalisation and high economic growth have left India...

-The Business Standard   Why Indian unemployment figures puzzle many Census data released on Tuesday contained a shocking piece of information: that 47 million young Indians, under the age of 24, were jobless, and looking for work. That's 20 per cent of the youth population. This is hard data confirming a fact that has long been anecdotal: that India has a jobs crisis. The picture that emerges from the Census data is intriguing:...

-Economic and Political Weekly     In exploring the link between food price inflation and rising rural real wages, this paper examines the dynamic relations between Rural Wages in different sectors and the relationship these wages share with increasing food prices. It looks into the possibility of a Lewsian transformation causing an increase in real Rural Wages, but the result of the analysis suggests that the rise in wages is because of an...

-The Business Standard   How a law to conserve groundwater led to a better paid and better organised migrant workforce Ludhiana: For some years now, Punjab's fields have lain fallow through the searing dry heat of May; but come June's steamy humidity, small bands of lithe, slender men from Bihar fan out across the waterlogged paddy fields, transplanting rice saplings with fluid efficiency. Bihar's paddy planters have frequented Punjab since the 1960s when rice...

-Live Mint   Voters who gave the Congress its worst drubbing did not reject its welfare agenda, but its performance There are many who interpret the emphatic rejection of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the significant endorsement of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the elections of 2014 as a mandate to end the architecture of rights-based legislation for social and economic welfare constructed during the 10-year UPA regime. Commentators opposed...