-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a bid to ensure higher returns for labourers in MGNREGA, the Union rural development ministry has again asked the finance ministry to index the wages under the job guarantee scheme to Consumer Price Index (rural - CPI-R) in place of the current CPI (agricultural labourers - CPI-AL). The RD ministry has argued that CPI (R) better reflects the present consumption pattern among rural households unlike...

-PTI Thiruvananthapuram: The CPI(M)-led LDF government in Kerala is all set to implement its new labour policy with the state cabinet according sanction for it today. A cabinet meeting, chaired by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, gave the nod to the Kerala State Labour Policy, which envisages making the state more employee-friendly and ensuring social security and decent wages to all workers. According to an official release, the new policy advocates stringent action against...

-The Indian Express The problem is under-employment. It won’t be resolved if the residually-employed are notionally shifted from the informal to formal sector. In an article in January, Soumya Kanti Ghosh and Pulak Ghosh (Ghosh and Ghosh) claimed that seven million new jobs have been created in the formal sector. Their claim is based on the increase in registration under the Employees Provident Fund (EPFO), National Pension Scheme and Employees State Insurance...

-The Hindu Telangana’s experience is instructive The institutionalisation of “social audits” to ensure implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has been challenging. Since being included in the 2005 Act at the behest of social movements, social audits have been ineffective in most parts of the country due to government indifference. So far, 26 States have created social audit units (SAUs), but the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG’s) detailed guidelines...

-News18.com In an interview with News18’s Rupashree Nanda, Dreze, who was a member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and an architect of the National Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), says that there have been no major initiatives in the social field in the last four years, with the partial exception of Swachh Bharat. Government data reveal that the Indian economy is growing at a robust rate but noted economist Jean Dreze believes...