-Livemint.com Merely putting the labour component of other projects in MGNREGA may not lead to any value addition There are several studies and reports that clearly show that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has accomplished its objectives to a large extent. Initially, this government derided the programme as some kind of a dole—but it later acknowledged its role in rural development, if reluctantly. The chief ministers’ council in...

-BusinessToday.in The scheme was ranked as the world's largest public works programme by the World Bank in 2015. MGNREGS has the potential to increase wages of casual labour if implemented at its full capacity. Under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a fiscal is provided to any rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work on demand. The scheme...

-National Herald Maitreesh Ghatak, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics, in an interview to Tathagata Bhattacharya says the government has failed on many counts At the end of the day, it is growth and employment generation via new investment that is key to long-term economic progress. Various welfare schemes are a way of providing a social safety net to the poor in the short-run. It is performance along these two...

-TheWire.in It will greatly bring down the poverty reduction impact of the programme, harm the construction of much-needed rural infrastructure and dramatically diminish the labourers’ bargaining power vis-à-vis the farmers. At the recent fourth governing council meeting of the NITI Aayog, the government announced the formation of a sub-group of chief ministers to propose ways of linking the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) with agricultural activities. The group is headed...

-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...