-Newsclick.in In an interview, the ‘father’ of India’s Green Revolution, says while technology is necessary, policies on procurement and public distribution are far more important in making agriculture economically viable and sustainable in the country. No one has played a more instrumental role in India’s self-sufficiency in food production than Dr MS Swaminathan — world-renowned agricultural scientist, known as the ‘Father of Green Revolution in India’. After getting a PhD from Cambridge...

-TheWire.in As modern jobs evade the state, rural millennials continue a pattern of out-migration that leaves hundreds of villages abandoned, or populated only by the elderly. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a third ‘M’, beyond Muslims and minorities, exists that can no longer wait to receive his attention. This is the epic-scale migration out of India’s mountain states, and I don’t mean Jammu and Kashmir. Uttarakhand became the 27th state of the...

-The Telegraph The most important implication of underfunding the MGNREGA is that the NDA denies that there is a jobs crisis Given the fact that a significant amount of jobs has been lost by casual rural workers in the recent past, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act gains added significance. It is supposed to provide 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to every adult in a household...

  Growth in rural wages not only indicates economic prosperity of the masses, it is also considered important so as to generate effective demand for goods and services, which is produced by various sectors of the economy. When money becomes available in the hands of rural workers due to government spending on programmes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), it generates demand for commodities. The production of commodities...

-The Hindu The proposal, a version of which has been previously presented to the Congress and to a foundation working with other Opposition parties, has been released in a policy paper titled ‘Strengthening towns through sustainable employment’. With rising unemployment becoming a major poll issue, and several political parties proposing solutions for it in their election manifestos, a group of labour researchers have proposed a national urban job guarantee programme for small...