PATIALA/SANGRUR: Everyone agrees that theNREGA is causing a shortage of agricultural labour. Everyone, that is, except the workers themselves. For the last two years, the "success" of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (commonly referred to as NREGA) in reducing the number of men migrating out of India's poorest states has become something of a truism. In Punjab, this has resulted in dozens of news articles about the shortage...

-The United Nations Almost 21 million people worldwide are trapped in jobs into which they were coerced or deceived and which they cannot leave, according to new estimates released today by the United Nations labour agency. Released by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the 2012 Global Estimate of Forced Labour found that the Asia-Pacific region accounts for the largest number of the 20.9 million forced labourers in the world – 11.7 million,...

The change is accompanied by a significant geographical shift from the south and north-east to states in other parts of India such as Maharashtra, Bihar, Orissa and Rajasthan Marking a dramatic shift in the demographic profile of people with AIDS, migrant workers and their wives have emerged as a high-risk group (HRG) for contracting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), with an infection rate surpassing that of injecting drug users, commercial sex...

For a district feted by the state as the best performer in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scheme, Aurangabad has perfected the art of graft. For, the Sillod taluka in the district has thrown up a case where nearly 800 tribal migrants, labouring since 2009, have not been paid a single rupee in wages, which have allegedly been siphoned off by the zilla parishad officials in...

The alleged incident of two quarry workers in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district being forced to swallow faeces draws attention to larger issues. NORMALLY the villages and hamlets in and around Thiruvakkarai in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district are woken up by the loud noise and vibrations caused by the blasting of rocks and the pounding of boulders with sledge hammers, apart from the rattling sound of tipper lorries transporting stones from 40-odd...