-Hindustan Times The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has witnessed the sharpest year-on-year increase in employment generation in its history in April 2021, government data shows, in a sign that the second Covid wave has caused major reverse MIgration adding to rural economic distress. According to rural development ministry data, around 22 million households have got work under the job guarantee in the month of April 2021, which is...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from MIgration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-The Hindu ‘This indicates the extent of reverse MIgration from lockdown States to native States’ The demand for MGNREGA work so far in the month of April has increased to 2.57 crore households, 92% higher than a year ago, and a record high for April since 2013, as per State Bank of India (SBI) research. “This indicates the extent of reverse MIgration from the lockdown States to their native States,” SBI group chief...

-The Hindu Leveraging existing schemes and providing universal social security is of utmost importance India is one of the largest welfare states in the world and yet, with COVID-19 striking in 2020, the state failed to provide for its most vulnerable citizens. The country witnessed multiple crises: mass inter- and intra-MIgration, food insecurity, and a crumbling health infrastructure. The extenuating circumstances of the pandemic has pushed an estimated 75 million people into...