-IdeasforIndia.com The Centre has sought an additional Rs. 25,000 crore as funding for MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Based on simple calculations using official data, Ashwini Kulkarni contends that the actual fund requirement is in fact much higher. As the pandemic continues to adversely impact rural livelihoods, the government should allocate sufficient funds to MNREGA, in order to honour the work-on-demand guarantee. For over a month, national and local...

-TheWire.in The current, complex payments systems employed by the government must give way to simple, decentralised systems to ensure greater accountability as empower local governing bodies. The Union government’s approach to payments under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has been a ridiculous joke, played on the workers who wait for their hard-earned money for a long time. Many do not get their payments at all, owing to various local malpractices....

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-Newsclick.in Street vendors have taken to the streets as they say they were pushed to poverty due to closure of weekly markets in the national capital. With bowls in their hands to signify destitution, thousands of street vendors took out a march on Saturday to the residences of the Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Minster of Delhi, demanding permission to resume their vending business. These are mostly vendors who depend on the...

The rise in COVID-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths compelled many state governments to impose local level lockdowns during April-May 2021. As of 20th April, 2021, partial lockdowns were noticed in 10 states across the country and complete lockdown was imposed in Delhi. As of 8th May, 2021, nearly the entire country was under complete lockdown as a result of either partial lockdowns and night curfews or complete...