-Press Note by People's Action for Employment Guarantee dated September 10th, 2020 MGNREGA during the pandemic and beyond: Implementation highlights, concerns and questions and demands for parliamentarians We are confronting an unprecedented crisis in the history of modern India. On the one hand, the increasing number of COVID cases point to a dubious distinction for India on the world stage. On the other hand, the unplanned lockdown has resulted in a massive...

-India.Mongabay.com * After a long wait, in 2019, the government of Rajasthan announced the welfare policy for mine and factory Workers who suffer from silicosis. * However, patients who are registered online, are largely getting the benefits of the scheme and thousands of certified silicosis patients, who are not registered online, are missing out on the relief. * The state government states that it will soon bring all the sick mine Workers online...

-The Telegraph The economic distress caused by unilaterally imposed lockdowns has brought the focus back on the rural job programme Narendra Modi’s cocky statement in Parliament in 2015 about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act being a monumental failure of the Congress regime may have been a political jibe, but it showed that the government had no intention of boosting a programme which, since its inception, has suffered from the...

-Livemint.com Rural India was battling economic difficulties even before the pandemic. The pandemic-induced lockdown increased hardships even further. The historic contraction in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) figure for the June-ended quarter has raised several questions on what the future holds, and what that contraction has meant for ordinary people. Macro-economic statistics can often fail to capture the diverse realities of a country as large as India, and hence it is useful...

-VillageSquare.in Lakhs of rural Rajasthan migrants returned easily during lockdown since they Worked in neighboring Gujarat. However, with no local employment avenues, the urban exodus would start again Udaipur (Rajasthan): Naresh from Kalunda village in the Gogunda region of Udaipur district Works at a furniture factory in Rajkot in the neighboring state of Gujarat. He stays in Rajkot for up to eight months a year, earning a salary of Rs 8,000 per...