-Press release by Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee, dated 29th July, 2020 The present Covid -19 crisis has brought to the fore the importance of MGNREGA in providing employment to rural workers as well as to those urban workers who due to lack of employment opportunities in urban areas were forced to migrate back to their villages. The Central Government is planning to launch an urban employment guarantee (UEG) programme at...

-Business Standard Wants one-third of beneficiaries to be women, says wages should not be less than urban state minimum pay, with provision to revise in line with cost of living Civil society activists have recommended mandatory 100 days of guaranteed employment for urban unemployed under any Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme planned by the government. In a letter to union urban development minister Hardeep Puri, People’s Action for Employment Guarantee, (PAEG) which had worked...

-The Indian Express Barring Mirzapur in UP, none of these districts is included in the official government list of 116 districts that received most returning migrant workers during the lockdown, and where the government had launched the PM Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan on June 20. New Delhi: At least 12 districts have exceeded their annual job creation targets by generating substantially higher numbers of person-days’ work between April 1 and July 21,...

-Down to Earth DTE visited village Dhamna in Uttar Pradesh’s Jalaun district to see how life in rural India is being sustained by the biggest employment guarantee scheme in the world People don’t eat paani poori during a pandemic. Out-of-business garment shops don’t employ tailors or hire security guards. It’s been five months since the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the subsequent countrywide lockdown stripped migrant labourers of their livelihood, leading to...

-Livemint.com As a part of the relief measures, while the PDS system could reach a vast majority of people both in rural and urban areas, the system has failed to identify the affected informally employed labour force in largely urban areas. This makes a case for introducing an urban replica of MGNREGA With laudable measures like the increased allocation in Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and the Pradhan Mantri...