-Frontline.in The increase in the budgetary allocation for the MGNREGA is only marginal. The scheme helped lower the poverty level by 32 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, but government support for it has been declining steadily. In the beginning, economists belonging to the Right and the Left were of the view that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was merely a populist measure. While the former believed...

-The Indian Express As it completes 10 years, there is enough evidence to show that India needs the MGNREGA Nearly a year ago, the prime minister made a statement in Parliament about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). He said: “My political understanding tells me, don’t ever stop MNREGA… because MNREGA is a living monument to your [the Congress’s] failures. After 60 years of independence, you had to...

-NDTV NREGA, today celebrating its 10th anniversary, has received a hostile reception from the current political dispensation. The Rajasthan Chief Minister questioning the need for a law, the then Rural Development minister's suggestion to limit NREGA to a few districts, and the Prime Minister's speech in Parliament in 2015 reveal the BJP's hostility and double standards (NREGA was passed unanimously in 2005). Yet, it would be wrong to lay the entire blame...

-Scroll.in Institutions that provide cheap or free meals are not mere populism – they are vital for the food security of people on the margins. My first experience of a “community kitchen” was in Brazil where we were taken to try out a meal at the Popular Restaurant in Lauros de Freitas. The serpentine queue outside it surprising initially, seemed entirely unexceptional once we had been served: for one real (approximately Rs...

-The Indian Express A renewed funding squeeze may undermine MGNREGA’s recent revival, fear civil society activists. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme which guarantees 100 days of wage employment per year to rural households, may have staged a revival in the last two quarters after showing a declining trend in person-days generation during the first year of the Narendra Modi government. But the turnaround could well be temporary,...