-Firstpost.com Ludhiana: Free meals, payment in advance, free liquor to ease aching limbs after a hard day’s work. Migrant labour in Punjab, mainly from Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, the mainstay of the state’s agriculture sector, has never had it so good. The problem, however, is the decreasing availability of this labour. Ask Baljinder Singh, a farmer with a 10-acre holding in Dakha village. Come sowing season in mid-June, Baljinder...

-BusinessToday.in The scheme was ranked as the world's largest public works programme by the World Bank in 2015. MGNREGS has the potential to increase wages of casual labour if implemented at its full capacity. Under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a fiscal is provided to any rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work on demand. The scheme...

-Livemint.com Merely putting the labour component of other projects in MGNREGA may not lead to any value addition There are several studies and reports that clearly show that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has accomplished its objectives to a large extent. Initially, this government derided the programme as some kind of a dole—but it later acknowledged its role in rural development, if reluctantly. The chief ministers’ council in...

-TheWire.in Real average daily wages improved between 1993-94 and 2011-12, but gains of growth have bypassed casual workers, women and rural areas. Over the past two decades, India became one of the two fastest growing economies in the world, alongside China. The gross domestic product (GDP) has risen four folds since 1993. But has this growth been distributed to lower economic inequality? Has the increase in wages matched the pace of growth...

-Livemint.com Rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha on how MGNREGS has evolved since 2006 to result in income, acreage, water tables, productivity and fodder availability Agrarian distress and rural distress are terms used interchangeably, but the rural economy today is very different from what it was many years ago, given the diversification of rural incomes and hence incorrect to think one means the other, says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, ministry of rural development. In...