While the revolutionary National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme has brought higher wages for labourers across the country, farmers and landlords in Tamil Nadu have begun to feel the pinch following its huge success. They don't get labourers to work in their fields due to low wages. Will the new choice force landlords to hike wages? Rural Tamil Nadu is witnessing a critical migration of labour. Farm workers, 80% of who...
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Child labour, still a common practice in large parts of rural India by Bidisha Fouzdar
In a small pastoral vand (hamlet) in Kutch, Gujarat, 10 year old Ramu wakes up at five in the morning. His mother serves him a hasty breakfast of bajra rotis after which he is packed off to the pasturelands surrounding their small hamlet to graze the family's buffaloes. Since his village does not have a working school, grazing the livestock is gainful employment from the point of view of Ramu's...
More »How women seized NREGA by Richard Mahapatra
Unique features of the public wage programme turn it into a magnet for women More women than men work under the national programme that guarantees employment to rural people. In the current fiscal till October, women availed of more than 50 per cent of employment created under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Their participation has been growing since the inception of the Act in 2006. This is...
More »Bengal’s migrant underbelly: Delhi tragedy rips a veil by Devadeep Purohit, Imran Ahmed Siddiqui amd Rith Basu
At least 29 of the 66 migrants crushed to death in east Delhi when a building collapsed on Monday night hailed from Bengal. The figure signposts the exodus of an abandoned generation and the inability of a state to retain its young or equip them for a better life elsewhere. The death of so many Bengalis has brought out in the open troubling issues that policymakers — both in the state...
More »'After elections, netas treat us like dogs if we ask them for work' by Sandeep Mishra
Neither celebrity nor politician, Sita Murmu, is extraordinary because she is the great survivor of that `other India'. She is not a beneficiary of the job guarantee scheme MGNREGA and doesn't have a BPL card. In her 60s, she lives in a Bhubaneswar slum and describes herself as a tribal widow without any land, regular income or schooling but "surviving —that itself is enough". Railing at the false promises of...
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