ActionAid Association's (AAA) national level survey among people dependent on the informal economy during the third phase of the national lockdown towards the end of May 2020 (i.e. between May 14th and May 22nd, 2020) has documented the "nature and extent of the transitions in the lives and livelihoods of informal workers, including migrant workers, during the pandemic and provide[s] an insight into the precarity they experience and the coping...
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A Reality Check on India’s Search for Digital Utopia -Preeti Mudliar
-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the persistent digital divide afflicting rural India owing to poor and insufficient internet connectivity. With the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech acknowledging the need ‘to complete’ internet connectivity to villages, there is a renewed vigour and interest in the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN)/BharatNet project. An important question to pose when translating policy to project is: when should...
More »MGNREGA: Today and tomorrow -Sunita Narain
-Down to Earth The programme can provide a safety net for the poor, not just in COVID-19 times, but for times to come In these darkest days of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) — when jobs and economies have collapsed — 56 million households got work in the past three months and these jobs provided relief. This was under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which perhaps is the...
More »No Internet, school comes home in rural Sikkim -Esha Roy
-The Indian Express While the Sikkim government has launched the Sikkim Edutech App to help students from Class 9-12 cope with the learning loss, it's the junior students and those in far flung areas who were left with little support. Sometime in April, with Covid forcing schools shut, Indra Mukhi Chhetri, a maths and science teacher in a rural area of South Sikkim district, began worrying about her students. While schools were...
More »There is confusion in the MIS data on approved labour budget and projected labour budget, says new tracker by Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee
-Second MGNREGA tracker by Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG), released on 17th August, 2020 A MGNREGA tracker has been prepared by the Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) that brings to you the latest developments, updates, and figures on the implementation of MGNREGA across the country till 3rd August, 2020. Given the significant role that MGNREGA is playing in the lives and livelihoods of rural workers, PAEG intends to keep...
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