-The Financial Express   Given that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is now a decade old, and there have been repeated allegations of it being a breeding ground for corruption, a thorough review of it is called for. Though Nitin Gadkari's plan to limit the scheme to the poorest districts and to change the amount reserved for labour payments did not go down well when he was the...

-Business Standard While the revised estimates of the gross domestic product (GDP) suggest the Indian economy turned the corner in 2013-14, concerns remain over the durability of this nascent recovery. Particularly worrying is the recent slowdown in rural wage growth, which signals a weakening of rural demand. Growth in rural wages, which had averaged 18 per cent in the previous few years, fell to less than five per cent in September...

-Economic and Political Weekly Examining the structural transformation in India and its developed states to know whether they have passed the Lewis turning point, this paper finds that there was slow structural change in labour markets at the national level. But states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana are on the verge of the Lewis turning point with faster non-farm sector growth, high per capita income, urbanisation,...

-The Indian Express Just a few years ago, the World Bank in its World Development Report claimed that migration from rural India to urban centres is "natural" and the same should not be interrupted or prevented through schemes like the MGNREGA. This was a shocking statement to all those who know why there is huge and ever-growing migration to cities, not only of the labour class but also of farmers and small...

-The Indian Express Rural wages in India have registered an average annual growth of 3.8 per cent in November, the lowest since July 2005, according to Labour Bureau data. The 3.8 per cent year-on-year increase is a significant drop relative to the two-digit growth rates prevailing until June, and the peak 20 per cent-plus levels of 2011 (see graph). "The numbers confirm the findings in our mid-year economic analysis that inflation is...