-IndiaSpend.com Bajra, jowar and ragi – millets usually consumed in India – have almost four times the iron contained in brown rice, and three times the folic acid per serving. The year 2023 was declared as the International Year of Millets by the United Nations General Assembly. #IYOM2023, as the Food and Agriculture Organization calls it, will be an opportunity to raise awareness about the nutritional benefits of millets and its suitability...

-Down to Earth The central government has mandated digitally capturing the attendance of all workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGnregs). Labourers and activist groups have opposed this and pointed out several loopholes in the move. The National Mobile Monitoring System, which came into effect on January 1, 2023, was launched with claims of bringing transparency and eliminating corruption at the ground level. Pilot tests began in May 2021 at...

-The Hindu Any delay in funds to be paid to States for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme payments is unethical A testy exchange in the Rajya Sabha between the Minister of State for Rural Development, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, and the Trinamool Congress MP, Jawhar Sircar, on the withholding of funds for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in West Bengal laid bare a key implementation issue —...

-Factchecker.in/ Scroll.in MGNREGA is a social security and employment scheme which aims to provide at least 100 days of guaranteed employment in a year to every rural household. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, while addressing the Lower House of the Parliament on December 14, claimed that the demand for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is declining. “There is now very obviously a declining demand for jobs in the...

- Deccan Herald Covid-19 reverse migration of labour added to joblessness A rise in self-employment and unpaid family labour three years into the Covid-19 pandemic even as wage rates fell is an indication that rural distress has risen, the economist Santosh Mehrotra writes. Economic distress was on an upward trajectory even before the Pandemic and the sudden arrival of millions of reverse migrants in 2020 added to the stock of unemployed people...