-The Economic Times   An expert group has recommended adding 30 agricultural and allied works under the Centre's flagship rural job guarantee scheme, in a revamp aimed at making the country's costliest social sector programme more effective.  As part of the overhaul of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the panel has also suggested an electronic fund management system to ensure timely transfer of money to needy districts.  The recommendations of...

It is getting harder for jobseekers to return to gainful employment and for new entrants to find adequate jobs, says the ILO. THERE is little in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) annual projection of job growth to cheer about. The year 2012 has been described as a year of stark reality. A third of the global workforce is currently unemployed or poor; that is, 200 million members of the 3.3-billion-strong global...

-Live Mint This week marks the completion of six years of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Six years is not a long period of time for any meaningful evaluation of a programme of such nature. However, even within this short period of time, the programme has attracted considerable attention. One part of this is the criticism of how the programme involved considerable leakages, did not create productive...

Sixth anniversary of the implementation of the scheme On the sixth anniversary of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Employment Scheme (MNREGS) there were protests outside the office of State Minister for Panchayat and Rural Development Subrata Mukherjee here on Thursday against the absence of work and delay in payment of wages under the scheme. Stating that so far an average of 15 person-days of work per household had...

As minister for rural development, Jairam Ramesh oversees the largest spending in the social sector by the government. This includes the marquee Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) that was pioneered by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2006. The minister, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for his forthrightness. In a typically candid interview to Mint on...