-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The rural development ministry wants states to raise a cadre of so-called barefoot engineers to boost the effectiveness of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) by helping to speed up Wage Payments that are getting delayed by as much as three months because there aren't enough employees to monitor the work being done under the jobs programme. The ministry wants to rope in those...
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Bharat sinking -Raj Kumar Ray
-The Financial Express In what could be a big question mark on the world's largest jobs scheme. In what could be a big question mark on the world's largest jobs scheme, the number of people who availed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) fell 8.4% year-on-year in 2013-14, reports Raj Kumar Ray in New Delhi. Also, only a tenth of the people enrolled got the promised 100 days of...
More »Bihar has little money to pay workers under MGNREGS -Alok Gupta
-Down to Earth Blames Centre for non-release of funds Bihar has very little money to pay people under the Central welfare scheme that guarantees 100 days of employment to the rural poor in a year. Central government's reluctance to release funds under its Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is said to be the main reason for the crisis. Nitish Mishra, Bihar's rural development minister, told Down To Earth that the...
More »Karthik Muralidharan, an assistant professor in the University of California interviewed by Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-The Business Standard Since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to put on hold the Aadhaar-based subsidy transfer for domestic liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), questions have been raised about the future of one of Congress' most ambitious initiatives aimed at plugging leakages. Two months after the government move, a pioneering study by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar showed leakages dropped 12 per cent when smart cards were...
More »MGNREGS social audit lessons from AP -Yamini Aiyar
-Live Mint Andhra Pradesh's experience with social audits holds important lessons for the Congress's empowerment agenda At the heart of the Congress party's narrative on the rights-based welfare state is the idea that rights laws, to quote Sonia Gandhi, "put pressure on the executive to be more responsive and accountable" and in doing so bring about an "empowerment revolution". To enable this revolution, rights laws have had built into them procedural...
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