-CaravanMagazine.in In May 2020, 10 central trade unions jointly wrote twice to Guy Ryder, the director general of the International Labour Organisation, drawing attention to the plight of Migrant Workers during the COVID-19 crisis as well as the government’s dilution and suspension of labour laws. In May, several states—including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat—introduced sweeping changes in labour laws such as increasing the working hours from eight to 12. The...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Lessons from the lockdown for India’s rural employment scheme -Vani Viswanathan, Sultan Ahmad & Aaditeshwar Seth
-Scroll.in Often the sole source of income for households in villages, NREGA has been plagued with issues during the pandemic. During the lockdown, an estimated 20 million to 30 million Migrant Workers returned home, out of work and out of money. Some of them tried helping their families with farming and some even used the skills they had developed to set up new enterprises. But most remained jobless. The National Rural Employment...
More »Refining trade union strategies to strike a chord -KR Shyam Sundar
-The Hindu With labour law reforms set to change industrial relations, trade union responses must include social dialogue too Ten central trade unions (CTUs) have called for a nation-wide strike on November 26, 2020 to condemn what they consider to be the anti-people, and anti-labour economic policies of the government. This follows strikes in the coal and defence sectors protesting privatisation and the corporatisation policies of the government. It is essential to...
More »The Migrant Worker as a ghost among citizens -Sampath G
-The Hindu A new publication contends that their lockdown misery was no anomaly but an effect of exclusion from full citizenship When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the world’s most stringent lockdown on March 24, 2020 with barely four hours notice, lakhs of Migrant Workers across the country found themselves trapped in a novel situation: their livelihood in the city was gone, but they could not return to their native villages. The...
More »35% of work under scheme meant for Migrant Workers went to MGNREGA -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-Business Standard The tentative data sourced from the GKRA website shows that since June, around 1.10 million works have been completed under the campaign. Much of the Rs 10,000-crore extra allocation for the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan (GKRA), an employment scheme for migrants thrown adrift by the sudden lockdown in March, will be spent on works done through the flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and rural housing project....
More »