Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday promised to usher in more reforms in the scheme under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and increase the number of days of job guaranteed to Below the Poverty Line households. Speaking at a function here to mark the completion of the fifth year of the MGNREGA, Dr. Singh promised to reform the delivery mechanism...
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Five years of MG-NREGS, World’s Largest Rural Job Scheme
Five years is a short period but the achievements are awesome. About ten crore poorest of India’s poor have opened personal accounts in banks or post offices; people demand work because it is their right; it has already regenerated ponds and water bodies and other community assets in thousands of villages; men and women get equal wages for equal work and ordinary people have a right to audit development works...
More »NREGS helps Kandhamal come out of communal hatred by Deba R Mohanty
Just two and half years ago, Kandhamal was India’s shame as a communal violence triggered by the killing of a Hindu seer left 38 people dead, thousands of houses and hundreds of churches burnt and vandalised and several thousand people scurrying to relief camps for safety. As Christian were slayed and attacked by VHP and RSS goons across the district, it forced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to call it a...
More »Neoliberal illogic by Prabhat Patnaik
The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....
More »Wages of tokenism by TK Rajalakshmi
The revised daily wage for NREGS workers is still lower than the minimum wages paid in several States. A CONTROVERSY seems to have surfaced between the Prime Minister's Office and the National Advisory Council (NAC) on the issue of wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The NAC has been arguing for some time that there should be parity between wages under the National Rural Employment...
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