-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...

-Livemint.com Intergenerational educational mobility continues to be low in India All of us love stories of the son or daughter of an uneducated daily wage labourer or farmer cracking civil service or Indian Institute of Technology entrance exams. The real question, however, is whether such success stories, constituting inter-generational upward mobility in education, are becoming more common or do they constitute pleasant aberrations? Recent economic research suggests that the latter situation...

-The Telegraph The recent budget talked about the government's plan to double farm incomes in the next five years. This will be done through investments in rural infrastructure, especially irrigation. About 50 per cent of land under foodgrain production in India is irrigated. This means that half of the foodgrain producing land in India faces weather uncertainties and, hence, those working on them face annual (seasonal) variations in income. These variations...

-The Hindu July-September quarter usually sees more jobs added New jobs in eight labour-intensive industries fell to a six-year low in the first nine months of 2015 — with just 1.55 lakh new jobs being created compared to over three lakh jobs over the same period in 2013 and 2014, according to Labour Bureau data. Analysts said this was not a healthy sign, especially since the July-September quarter usually sees more jobs being...

-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...