Good sections of rural India don’t want NREGA any more, showing the government spending pattern on the scheme. Since a large percentage of the village labourers have moved to the cities, it makes far better sense to develop an unemployment dole for them. The subtext is an accounting arrangement that ensures that like NREGA, the government can keep on rolling out similar entitlement programmes like the proposed Food Security Act, but...

-The Telegraph   The CBI today began probing an Uttar Pradesh health scam running into thousands of crores that has led to the murders of two honest government doctors and the sacking of two ministers. The issue relates to the spending of Rs 10,000 crore allocated to the state under the National Rural Health Mission. CBI spokesperson Dharini Mishra said the agency had registered five preliminary inquiries on the orders of Allahabad High Court,...

After being mired in controversies across the nation over multi-crore scams, the MGNREGA scheme hasn’t quite made headway in Bulandshahr district’s Anupshahr yet, say Bhamati Sivapalan and Yamini Deenadayalan “MGNREGA is a flop in Uttar Pradesh,” extended NGO worker Manish Sharma, as small talk, at the block development office of Anupshahr in the Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh. Despite having been in force since 2005, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment...

The UID in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act may simplify the administrator's task, but will not make a poor man's task any easier. EVERY time there is talk of tinkering with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), it is time we recalled how and why the Act came into existence. The passage of the NREGA was Parliament's response to a people's movement that grew out of the recognition and...

The annual report of the International Institute for Labour Studies projects a grim future for employment prospects. WITH the United States and much of Europe grappling with the slowdown in their economies and the resultant social unrest, the publication of the World of Work Report 2011: Making Markets Work for Jobs could not have come at a more opportune moment. Brought out by the International Institute for Labour Studies, which was...