The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has been hailed as a landmark initiative to alleviate poverty and generate productive wage employment, even if for only 100 days, for unskilled rural labour. Given its historic features, it is a pity that the rollout of the programme in many states has been less than satisfactory, and leakage of funds has become rampant. More worryingly, it has begun to have...

After sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh, it’s now the turn of jute mills in West Bengal to reel under shortage of labour. This has forced many jute mills to reduce their production hours and go for production cuts. The 52 working jute mills in West Bengal employ around 400,000 workers and the labour shortfall is about 30 per cent. “The workers are more interested in getting engaged in different government schemes like...

For some reason, governments - as well as the development ''industry'' as a whole - have always had a tendency to look for universal panaceas, particular silver bullets that will solve all or most of their implementation problems and somehow achieve the development project for them. The latest such initiative bullet that seems to have been accepted as a silver bullet is the Unique Identification Project, which is now seen...

A direct outcome of the global economic crisis has been a decline in the rate of growth of wages across the world, barring Asia and Latin America. A study by the International Labour Organisation, Global Wage Report 2010-11: Wage policies in times of crisis, highlights this reality and points to the need for countries to put in place proper social and labour market policies to protect an increasingly vulnerable workforce....

Retail giants pushing the European Union-India free trade deal promise consumers a "new and dynamic retail experience" but ignore the fate of India’s "mom-and-pop" stores and some 40 million people they employ. Four years in the making, the EU-India Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement made serious headway during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Brussels Dec. 10 and is due to be signed and sealed early 2011. But the negotiations have...