-The Business Standard Rainfall shortage in Rajasthan to hit summer and winter crops Alwar (Rajasthan): Khajura Ram has an agonising fortnight ahead. If it does not rain in the next 15 days, he not only will have a poor summer bajra crop; his winter wheat or mustard will suffer as well because it will have to be planted late. "By the middle of August, the bajra crop should have been ready for harvesting...

-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Indian Express Focusing on private asset creation will only exacerbate its design and implementation failures. In his budget speech, Arun Jaitley shied away from taking a tough stand on the MGNREGA. In a seemingly non-controversial comment, he emphasised that "wage employment would be provided under MGNREGA through works that are more productive, asset creating and substantively linked to agriculture and allied activities". The subtext, however, is controversial. As argued below, far...

-The Business Standard   Why Indian unemployment figures puzzle many Census data released on Tuesday contained a shocking piece of information: that 47 million young Indians, under the age of 24, were jobless, and looking for work. That's 20 per cent of the youth population. This is hard data confirming a fact that has long been anecdotal: that India has a jobs crisis. The picture that emerges from the Census data is intriguing:...

-The Business Standard   How a law to conserve groundwater led to a better paid and better organised migrant workforce Ludhiana: For some years now, Punjab's fields have lain fallow through the searing dry heat of May; but come June's steamy humidity, small bands of lithe, slender men from Bihar fan out across the waterlogged paddy fields, transplanting rice saplings with fluid efficiency. Bihar's paddy planters have frequented Punjab since the 1960s when rice...