-The Indian Express Human Development Report: Spending 4% of GDP can ensure social security net. India may have little to feel proud about in the findings of UNDP's Human Development Report for 2014, but the good news is that with ongoing rural employment and school education programmes and some serious discussions on universal healthcare over the last couple of years, it is moving in the right direction. The report gives a six-point...
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Killing MGNREGA slowly -Raghav Gaiha and Shylashri Shankar
-The Indian Express Focusing on private asset creation will only exacerbate its design and implementation failures. In his budget speech, Arun Jaitley shied away from taking a tough stand on the MGNREGA. In a seemingly non-controversial comment, he emphasised that "wage employment would be provided under MGNREGA through works that are more productive, asset creating and substantively linked to agriculture and allied activities". The subtext, however, is controversial. As argued below, far...
More »No going back on MGNREGA -Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy
-The Indian Express The budget will reveal whether the BJP is committed to this transformative programme. Mohandas Pai, currently an advisor to the BJP government in Rajasthan, was asked on television how the government could "control" social sector expenditure, more specifically on the MGNREGA. He answered that the NDA should simply learn from and follow former Union minister P. Chidambaram's policy of "benign neglect". Clarifying further, he explained how the UPA...
More »Women’s Participation in NREGS Drops -Siba Mohanty
-The New Indian Express BHUBANESWAR: With women's participation in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) on a decline in the State, the Odisha Government has asked the district collectors to adopt women-specific plans to reverse the trend. Apart from specific types of work which are favourable to women, facilities at the work sites and if possible, incentives must also be provided to district coordinators, the collectors have been told. In...
More »MGNREGS: Rural development ministry may speed up wage payments -Yogima Seth Sharma
-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The rural development ministry wants states to raise a cadre of so-called barefoot engineers to boost the effectiveness of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) by helping to speed up wage payments that are getting delayed by as much as three months because there aren't enough employees to monitor the work being done under the jobs programme. The ministry wants to rope in those...
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