-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...

-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....

-The Indian Express All indications show that an economic revival will take some time — support is required during this period to at least prevent starvation. The effects of the lockdown and the resultant economic crisis continue to disproportionately impact the poor and informal sector workers. Since the lockdown, the Government of India (GoI) has announced relief packages under the Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY) and Atmanirbhar Bharat. However, numerous studies...

-National Herald The numbers show that it has come to the rescue of India’s rural workforce as the country battles one of its worst phases of economic slowdown and unemployment Over 9 crore persons living in rural parts of the country found informal work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2020 till October, a Right to Information (RTI) reply seen by NH has revealed. The rural workers...

-Scroll.in ‘We are still very far from financial inclusion in the full sense of the term,’ the economist says in the foreward to a new report on delays in NREGA payments. Transaction failures in Direct Benefit Transfer payments have been widely discussed in recent times, notably in the context of wage payments under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees memebers of rural families 100 days of work a year. However,...