-The Financial Express The proposed MGNREGA changes can help plug the leakages and enhance agriculture productivity There is good news about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) scheme. Recent press reports reveal that the rural development minister, Nitin Gadkari, has instructed lowering of the mandatory share for unskilled wages in total expenditure from the current 60% to 51%. He has also directed, quite rightly, that 50% of the expenditure be...

-The Indian Express Moves to dilute labour-material ratio in MGNREGA and focus exclusively on select backward blocks will adversely impact rural poor. Before the general elections, free-market fundamentalists had lobbied fiercely to reshape so-called wasteful social-sector expenditures. Primary among their targets was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which, according to them, should become an unconditional cash transfer scheme. Post-elections, the late Gopinath Munde's espousal of the MGNREGA went...

-PTI Amidst opposition in several quarters to its plan to tweak the rural job scheme, NDA government on Thursday asserted that it would go ahead with MGNREGA reforms as it charged that the flagship programme of the previous UPA regime "was allowed to be exploited for purely partisan purposes". "The tendencies of acquiring easy money and using government funds for political party promotion could be curbed only when a spirited team of...

-The Hindustan Times India's wholesale inflation rate plunged to 2.38% in September, the lowest in five years, aided by a sharp drop in vegetable and petrol prices, data released on Tuesday showed, rekindling hopes that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will cut interest rates soon. The more than one percentage point drop in wholesale inflation rates over August's 3.74% should bring cheer to the NDA government, which rode to a landslide...

-The Business Standard Alarm bells on rural jobs guarantee law   A group of around 30 economists from India and abroad have written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to ensure there is no dilution or restriction of the provisions of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). They have argued the scheme has wide-ranging social benefits, beside creation of productive assets. They have said corruption was and remains...