More than five years have passed since the world’s largest employment programme was launched in India. The scale of employment generated was not the only reason that this is a path breaking legislation. The MGNREGA is the first national law to establish rights in the development sector. It is demand based, and not constrained by arbitrary and restrictive selections like the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. Any person living in a...

A thinking government, regional or central, would ensure sustainable wages for skilled artisans and help them market the handcrafted products, instead of letting them join the NREGS queue. The design and execution of the much-touted National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) are likely to leave a lasting impact on some areas of our economy. Surely, the prototype version did not foresee that it would act as a catalyst for changes that...

There is nothing wrong in having advisory groups. But there is a problem when groups not constituted legally cross the line of demands, advice and rights-based, democratic agitation. The 1990s saw marketing whiz kids at the largest English daily in the world steal a term then in vogue among sexually discriminated minorities: PLUs — or People Like Us. Media content would henceforth be for People Like Us. This served advertisers' needs...

Its elimination is an international obligation, but there is a long way to go to meet the goal While governments and civil society commemorate the World Day Against Child Labour on June 12, over 20 crore children are still engaged as child labourers. More than half of them face the worst forms of child labour. Though India has the dubious distinction of having the largest number of child labourers, this...

-PTI   The head of South Africa’s powerful federation of trade unions has asked the government to consider replicating the model of India’s rural employment guarantee scheme MNERGA to address the huge unemployment problem in the country. Mr Zwelinzima Vavi, head of the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), believes that the model used in India could also work in South Africa. Speaking at a University of Johannesburg seminar around constitutional...