While the revolutionary National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme has brought higher wages for labourers across the country, farmers and landlords in Tamil Nadu have begun to feel the pinch following its huge success. They don't get labourers to work in their fields due to low wages. Will the new choice force landlords to hike wages? Rural Tamil Nadu is witnessing a critical migration of labour. Farm workers, 80% of who...

Two committees of the labour ministry on Wednesday proposed to double the annual 100 days of work guaranteed to the rural poor by India’s marquee welfare programme, but the ministry may pare the suggested increase before putting it up to the cabinet for approval. The provision to provide work for 100 days to at least one member of every rural family under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)...

The two day 43rd Session of the Indian Labour Conference (ILC), the apex national tripartite body that discusses key issues affecting labour and employment and provides policy perspectives and recommendations, concluded in New Delhi today. The Conference was inaugurated by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh on Tuesday 23rd November 2010. Senior level representatives of the three pillars of the tripartism, Trade Unions, Employers’ Associations and Government, participated in the deliberations...

It is quite likely that a few weeks from now someone will be knocking at your doors and asking for your fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a national database, along with personal characteristics (age, sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census household listing” earlier this year. The purpose of this exercise is to build the National...

Often called Chanakya for his political astuteness, Engineer-politician Nitish Kumar blended his secularist ideology with pragmatic politics and combined the development plank with innovative social engineeering equations in Bihar to bask in glory yet again. Doing an encore after today's landslide victory, the 59-year-old chief minister with his trademark kurta pyjama and grey stubble has become RJD strongman Lalu Prasad's nemesis single handedly contributing to the electoral meltdown of RJD-led Secular...