-The Indian Express The scheme should be refocused towards creating durable assets in agriculture. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has a significant influence on agricultural operations and cultivation costs. If its present focus on community works can be reoriented to proactively promote improvements on the landholdings of small and marginal farmers through the creation of durable assets, it will be beneficial for agricultural productivity and incomes. Critics say that...

-The Times of India RAJKOT: A farmer Janak Patel in Abharampara village of Amreli district has seen his entire sowing on 40 bigha land going waste. He had anticipated rainfall within 30 days of sowing. However, monsoon did not keep its date with the state. "I had sown cotton in 40 bigha land 30 days ago thinking that rain would come on time. But all has gone waste," said Patel adding that...

-The Financial Express MGNREGA must be tweaked in implementation, not design. Before his tragic demise, the Union minister for rural development, Gopinath Munde, gave a clear indication of the new government's priorities on MGNREGA. Both these priorities are vital: using the programme for the creation of productive assets to combat drought and poverty and ensuring timely payment of wages. More than two decades of liberalisation and high economic growth have left India...

-International Business Times   Consider this: There are 400 million Indians with no access to workplace benefits, such as social security, health insurance or unemployment insurance, a number higher than the population of the United States and Canada combined, according to a Delhi-based group of economic researchers. So, as the United States grapples with growing income inequality, it takes a country like India to put some of those economic and working realities into...

-The Business Standard   How a law to conserve groundwater led to a better paid and better organised migrant workforce Ludhiana: For some years now, Punjab's fields have lain fallow through the searing dry heat of May; but come June's steamy humidity, small bands of lithe, slender men from Bihar fan out across the waterlogged paddy fields, transplanting rice saplings with fluid efficiency. Bihar's paddy planters have frequented Punjab since the 1960s when rice...