-Down to Earth The Government of India amended the payment procedure for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) some time ago. Due to this, MGNREGA workers in the states and Union territories faced a delay in their wage payment. This delay came at a time when the second wave of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was wreaking havoc across the country. MGNREGA was started in 2006. Economist and honorary...
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Several studies but one conclusion -- poorly planned COVID-19 induced national lockdown hurt the poor the most
The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...
More »Less food, more work: pandemic hit poor women the hardest, says study
-TheFederal.com Dalberg research finds women from low-income sections were first to lose jobs and last to regain them due to COVID disruptions While the pandemic was tough on the nation’s poor, the women from the low-income section were dealt a harder blow, research has revealed. As a cash crunch hit household expenses, women’s nutrition, health and employment were the worst hit and the last to recover. A study by consulting firm Dalberg —...
More »Migrant workers bore the brunt of 2020 lockdown due their poor access to social security schemes & legal rights, depicts latest NHRC report
The rise in COVID-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths compelled many state governments to impose local level lockdowns during April-May 2021. As of 20th April, 2021, partial lockdowns were noticed in 10 states across the country and complete lockdown was imposed in Delhi. As of 8th May, 2021, nearly the entire country was under complete lockdown as a result of either partial lockdowns and night curfews or complete...
More »Why do ASHA workers in India earn so little? -Shruti Ambast
-CBGAIndia.in India’s response to the pandemic has depended heavily on the exploited labour of women workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds. These are ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists, the cadre of frontline health workers that has been mobilised for everything from door-to-door surveys, distributing medicine kits, measuring oxygen saturation, monitoring containment zones and spreading awareness about vaccines. 70,000 such women recently went on strike in Maharashtra demanding higher pay,...
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