-The Indian Express After the Finance Ministry rejected the recommendations of two recent government panels, MGNREGA workers in 10 states will get no raises in 2018-19. Minimum farm wages are now higher in many states. The last time the union government brought MGNREGA wages at par with minimum agricultural wages was in 2009. Two years later, in 2011, only four states — Kerala, Goa, Haryana and Mizoram — had minimum agricultural wages...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government's spending on the rural job scheme increased 10 per cent in the last fiscal despite a matching decline in the number of beneficiaries because of deletion, challenging claims that weeding out bogus card-holders helped cut down on expenditure and pointing to the lack of jobs in rural areas. After verification, the government struck off the names of 1.62 crore job card-holders under the Mahatma Gandhi National...

-Newsclick.in Shrinking farm incomes, frozen wages and lack of jobs is driving people to work in the scheme for a pittance. Nearly 9 crore Indians applied for work in the rural jobs guarantee scheme (MGNREGS) in 2017-18, according to data put out by the ministry of rural development. That’s a staggering 42% of the rural work force. Of those who applied for work, some 1.4 crore persons (or about 15%) were turned...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre is considering doubling the monthly pay of the country's 25 lakh midday meal cook-cum-helpers to Rs 2,000, but the unions say the proposed raise is too little. The cooks' current pay of Rs 1,000 - a fraction of the official minimum wages - has been static since 2009, with successive governments keeping a proposed hike pending for the past five years. Now, a year before the general...

-Hindkisan.com Alarmingly, despite wages paid under MGNREGA being much lower than the standard minimum wage in most states, increasing number of people from rural households are applying for jobs under the employment scheme. This trend is an indicator of the mounting distress in the rural economy which is aggravated by paucity of jobs. Mocking the economic condition of the distressed rural working community, the Union Government has decided to uphold the low...