-Livemint.com/ Bloomberg Corruption being rife though, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has boosted agricultural wages and rural-labour market Over the last 10 years in India, perhaps no other law has sparked such sustained debate as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), universally known as ‘Narega.’ Passed by the previous Congress government in February 2006 and upheld by the Narendra Modi administration, it’s given rise to the...

-The Times of India Kendrapada: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has failed to take off in 21 gram panchayats of Kendrapada district. The district collector has decided to take disciplinary action against the sarpanchs and panchayat executive officers of these panchayats. District collector Niranjan Nayak said, "The administration has already issued show-cause notices to the sarpanchs and panchayat executive officers of Bagada, Dashipur, Silipur, Bachara, Balipatana, Baluria, Nilakanthapur,...

-Frontline.in The increase in the budgetary allocation for the MGNREGA is only marginal. The scheme helped lower the poverty level by 32 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, but government support for it has been declining steadily. In the beginning, economists belonging to the Right and the Left were of the view that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was merely a populist measure. While the former believed...

-CaravanMagazine.in Political realities blunt Narendra Modi’s attack on the NREGA At the end of December 2015, the central rural development ministry was in a state of panic. Nine of India’s largest states had declared drought in several districts. The scant kharif harvest meant many farm labourers, who might have been employed on fields, went without work. Water was so scarce that many farms weren’t sowing a winter crop, further diminishing employment...

-The Hindu Business Line Ten years on, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act endures because it provides the poor a political voice February 2016 marks a decade since India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) came into force. NREGA is both revolutionary and modest; it promises every rural household one hundred days of employment annually on public-works projects, but the labour is taxing and pays minimum wage, at best. Many charges have...