-Hindustan Times The workers stage the unique protest against the Centre’s decision to increase their wages from Rs 167 to Rs 168. Ranchi/ Latehar: Several Jharkhand MNREGA workers have returned Rs 1, the amount the Centre has increased in their wages, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and state chief minister Raghubar Das to protest the meagre hike. The union government has recently increased the wages for the Jharkhand workers under the Mahatma...

-The Asian Age Amarjeet Sinha said it was a myth that people were losing work for not having Aadhaar cards. New Delhi: The central government extended the cut off date for 100 per cent Aadhaar coverage in the MGNREGA to September 30, instead of the earlier deadline of March 31. The move comes after the Centre faced widespread criticism from civil society activists over making Aadhaar compulsory for getting work under the...

-TheWire.in Most technocratic interventions introduced in MGNREGA appear to be designed to aid administrators rather than for actually helping workers. In his 2017-18 Budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley asserted with great conviction that the ruling dispensation’s “initiative to geo-tag all MGNREGA assets” to put them “in public domain has established greater transparency”. In 2016-17, the rural development ministry started an initiative called ‘GeoMGNREGA’, under which it was proposed that all assets created under...

-IndiaSpend.com Kamla Devi (not her real name), of advanced but uncertain age, lives in Lohari, a remote adivasi village located inside a wildlife sanctuary in Udaipur, Rajasthan. On a summer day in 2016, we approached her as she was chasing after a small herd of goats, to ask questions as part of a study on the relation between ageing, paid work and pensions. Our very first question–whether she was a beneficiary of...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Jharkhand’s bureaucrats have denied thousands of farm workers their legally mandated livelihoods under the guise of plugging leakages in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), say activists. Earlier this month, HT reported that the ministry of rural development had cancelled 93 lakh MGNREGA job cards — of which 2.67 lakh cards were from Jharkhand — to weed out duplicates and cards corresponding to dead beneficiaries. At the...