-The Indian Express ‘Expect 215 crore person-days of employment in 2016-17’ The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), the flagship welfare programme of the previous UPA dispensation, seems to have received a fresh lease of life. This, barely a year after PM Narendra Modi had called it a “living monument of your (the Congress’s) failure to tackle poverty in 60 years”. Arun Jaitley’s Union budget for 2016-17 has provided a...
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The Poor Badly Needed a Good Budget this Year. Well, They Didn’t Get It. -Bharat Dogra
-TheWire.in Jaitley said he was making a record allocation to NREGA but the increase is a modest one in real terms and is even more suspect if one considers the backlog from previous year, particularly of Delayed Wages While various lobbyists did what they could to keep the finance ministry well informed about their demands, one is not so sure whether the needs of the poorest and most needy sections were articulated...
More »Improper Implementation of MGNREGA in Telangana -G Rajendra Kumar
-TheHansIndia.com The ongoing drought is fuelling distress migration from districts in Telangana, a trend that was witnessed in the early 2000s. The severe drought conditions for the second consecutive year have led to crop failure, mounting debts, chronic unemployment and failure of the NREGA scheme, especially in the districts of Mahbubnagar, Medak, and Adilabad, forcing large-scale exodus of farmers and others. The fruits of a people’s movement and the world’s largest anti-poverty...
More »The 'making' of rural India -Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh
-Deccan Herald Just recall the scene in parliament when the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was passed in 2005. In Lok Sabha, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee put forth the motion – “Those in favour, say aye” – a unanimous chorus rose from the packed Lok Sabha. “Those against, say no,” – there was dead silence. “I think the ayes have it!” he said – and a seminal, landmark legislation became a reality. As then...
More »A jobs scheme that steadied India
-The Hindu It is now a decade since the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme was launched, and it can be said with reasonable assurance that the programme has been largely successful in living up to what it set out to do: provide employment to India’s rural poor and improve their livelihoods. Sceptics of the spending programme, launched in 2006, had raised concerns that it would be yet another opportunity...
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