-TheWire.in Panchayats and labour workforce unions have openly traded barbs over a move to cap paddy transplant wages in several villages. Chandigarh: “This time paddy transplant rates in our village will not be more than Rs 2,700 per acre. If anyone pays more than what is decided, he will be fined Rs 5,000,” said an elderly man, as he addressed a gathering in Gharyala Kurd village in Punjab’s Taran Taran district, approximately...
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Why cash can save the rural jobs scheme -Reetika Khera
-Livemint.com * India is set to spend over ₹1 tn on the world’s largest rural employment programme. Can it be made to work better? * Large work sites should be opened proactively in each panchayat without waiting for applications. Anyone who shows up should be allowed to work and payments should be in cash If we get work in the village, why would we go elsewhere? We have worked on NREGA before, but...
More »Recent survey by civil society group show 'access-to-food' situation improves in Jharkhand, although much is required to be done for the poor & marginalised
-Press release by Right to Food Campaign, Jharkhand chapter, dated 26th May, 2020 Following the first round of quick survey of essential facilities in rural areas of Jharkhand that was conducted during the first week of April 2020, a second round of survey was done in the second and third week of May this year by members (called "observers") of the Right to Food Campaign, state chapter. Like the previous one,...
More »Responding to COVID-19 at the grassroots -TR Raghunandan
-The Hindu Kerala and Karnataka have shown how democratic decentralisation has worked in their favour Mahatma Gandhi envisioned that a free India would rest on a foundation of gram panchayats, village republics that governed locally and epitomised Swaraj in practice. B.R. Ambedkar was sceptical; he described the caste-ridden, unequal village society as a cesspool. Yet, he was not unequivocally against decentralisation. Locally relevant initiatives The 73rd Constitutional Amendment mandates the constitution of panchayats at...
More »Five weeks of lockdown. Year-long losses. Adivasi villages in MP show why Centre must step up relief -Supriya Sharma
-Scroll.in Sahariya Adivasis in Madhya Pradesh have suggestions for the Modi government. Huddled under a tree in Pahadgarh at half past noon on May 2, the women seemed to be waiting patiently for their turn. Perhaps there was a bank around the corner, I wondered, and they were waiting to withdraw the Rs 500-coronavirus lockdown allowance that the central government had sent to the bank accounts of women under the Jan Dhan...
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