-Hindustan Times Expanding the scheme will improve incomes, boost demand. Along with expanding the scheme, the ministry must also roll out without delay, as promised, a programme for skill building of these workers so they can move up the economic value chain, and also utilise this labour in a proactive manner for water conservation projects, another key programme of the Centre. A report in the Hindustan Times on Monday said that...

-The Indian Express Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, provides unskilled manual work for 100 days to eligible rural households. Facing criticism over rising unemployment and rural distress, the Union government plans to launch a new project under which a stipend of up to Rs 20,000 will be given to Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) labourers who undergo training in skills such as masonry or carpentry. The...

-Scroll.in It provides no guidelines to account for minimum consumption by households, despite Supreme Court rulings on this. Over the past year, the government has taken steps to consolidate India’s complicated patchwork of labour laws into four codes. The Code on Wages, 2019, which received presidential assent on August 8, is the first of the codes to come into effect. This Wages Code has been enacted with the express objective of simplifying...

-The Indian Express Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer introduced a paradigm shift in approach to alleviating poverty. The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2019 has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. The approach, popularly known as Randomised Control Trial (RCT), has been the buzzword among development economists for almost two decades. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer have used this technique (inspired...

-The Hindu While indexation of the NREGA wages is critical, lifting them to the minimum wage would help workers and the economy The government made two recent announcements at two ends of the spectrum to mitigate the economic crisis. One concerns a new indexation of NREGA wages meant to increase rural incomes. The second is a reduction in corporate tax rate. Prices of commodities increase each year, so it’s important to accurately estimate...