-Newsclick.in Kicking off a 3-day nationwide campaign on Wednesday, NREGA Sangharsh Morcha cited “derisively low budget allocation” and “long delays in wage payments” as reasons for turning many rural workers away from the employment guarantee scheme. New Delhi: Days after the Centre cited the drop in demand for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to suggest stability in the labour market, rural workers and social activists, as...

-TheThirdPole.net This year, Bihar extended a seasonal ban on mining sand from its rivers. But illegal sand mining continues every day across the eastern Indian state Deep inside the riverine belt of Koelwar in Bhojpur district of Bihar, around four to five kilometres from the main road and well out of sight, a dozen labourers are cutting and digging a portion of the Sone River in bright afternoon sunshine. Bare-chested, wielding spades...

-Down to Earth The arduous journeys of those who migrate for medical treatment in India Marta kya na karta (One can do anything when pushed to the wall),” says 40-year-old Rita Kumari from Supaul district of north Bihar. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was tightening its grip across the country Rita and her daughter, Sandhya, had to undertake multiple trips to hospitals in Nepal and Uttar Pradesh, before reaching the All...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-Down to Earth Post mechanisation, for the first time there is innovation in farm equipment to revive bullocks and aid small farmers Simhachalam calls himself a ‘bullock entrepreneur’. Each agricultural season, this farmer from Andhra Pradesh’s Sangra village travels with his pair of bullocks to work on other people’s farms in nearby villages for a fee. Like most other parts of the country, bullocks in these tribal villages are traditionally used only for...