Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...
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Jean Drèze, development economist and social activist, interviewed by Shreehari Paliath (IndiaSpend.com)
-IndiaSpend.com Bengaluru: Global economic output is expected to contract by 4.9% in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 lockdown. India announced a lockdown on March 24, 2020, which was extended over two months, and continues in pockets of states depending on the spread of the disease, which has now infected more than half a million people in the country. The lockdown impacted millions of inter-state migrant workers who form the bulwark of India’s...
More »Modi government should embrace NREGA without trying to defend the indefensible -Debmalya Nandy & Rajendran Narayanan
-Scroll.in The government subjected the rural job scheme to systemic shocks but must now scale it up to 200 days of work to combat lockdown losses. The impact of the Modi government’s unilateral decision to impose a two-month-long nationwide lockdown has amplified the crisis faced by India’s 50-crore strong unorganised workforce. A potent option at present to cushion some of the blow is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The law, which was...
More »Centre for Equity Studies report reveals ‘major caste biases in supporting migrant workers’ during COVID-19 lockdown
-TwoCircles.net Centre for Equity Studies has released a report on the migrant crisis documenting how India’s most vulnerable class has suffered due to the unplanned national lockdown by the Central government for COVID-19. The report titled ‘Labouring Lives: Hunger, Precarity and Despair amid Lockdown’ addressed vital questions of how the country’s labouring class – stranded and jobless – coped with the lockdown living away from their homes. The research has been conducted...
More »Two joblessness narratives in India from two large-scale surveys -Sriharsha Devulapalli and Pramit Bhattacharya
-Livemint.com A Mint analysis suggests that the CMIE figures should not be considered a proxy for the official unemployment and labour force participation rates As the country went under lockdown, and everything, including the collection of statistics, came to a halt, analysts and economists were left scrambling for data to seize up just how badly the economy was doing. One dataset that has come to the rescue is the nationally representative employment-unemployment...
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