-National Herald The numbers show that it has come to the rescue of India’s rural workforce as the country battles one of its worst phases of economic slowdown and unemployment Over 9 crore persons living in rural parts of the country found informal work under the Mahatma Gandhi National rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2020 till October, a Right to Information (RTI) reply seen by NH has revealed. The rural workers...

-IDROnline.org Often the sole source of income for rural households, NREGA has been plagued with issues during the pandemic. Insights from the ground explain why. During the lockdown, an estimated 20 to 30 million migrant workers returned home, out of work and out of money. Some of them tried helping their families with farming and some even used the skills they had developed to set up new enterprises. But most remained jobless....

-Scroll.in ‘We are still very far from financial inclusion in the full sense of the term,’ the economist says in the foreward to a new report on delays in NREGA payments. Transaction failures in Direct Benefit Transfer payments have been widely discussed in recent times, notably in the context of wage payments under the National rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees memebers of rural families 100 days of work a year. However,...

-The Hindu Multiple bank visits, repeated rejections and biometric errors mar payment system, says study. For most rural workers dependent on the Mahatama Gandhi National rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), their labour does not end at the work site. According to a study by LibTech India released on Wednesday, many of them are forced to make multiple trips to the bank, adding travel costs and income losses, and face repeated rejections of...

-Down to Earth Government spending has led to demand growth in rural areas; but what if it comes down? rural India has emerged as the saviour of the shattered Indian economy. From Ratan Tata to the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, everybody is betting on the consumption demand growth in rural areas to boost the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic-stricken economy. There is a lot of talk on the ‘green shoots’...