-Scroll.in A rise in work allocation through the pandemic saw an enthusiastic response. Now, delayed wages and reduced allocation forces workers out of the district again. Bardha Girdhar had to wait more than six months to get Rs 2,976 he had earned for digging trenches in Nandurbar. A farmer who own a patch of land of a little over two acres in the district, Giridhar spends some part of the year growing...

-Newsclick.in Kicking off a 3-day nationwide campaign on Wednesday, NREGA Sangharsh Morcha cited “derisively low budget allocation” and “long delays in wage payments” as reasons for turning many rural workers away from the employment guarantee scheme. New Delhi: Days after the Centre cited the drop in demand for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to suggest stability in the labour market, rural workers and social activists, as...

-TheWire.in While employment was hit harder in urban areas due to the extent of disruption to urban business by the national lockdowns, rural India saw a more unequal distribution of these effects due to high discrimination. In the first article in this two-part series, we looked at the findings on discrimination in India’s labour market detailed in Oxfam’s India Discrimination Report 2022.  While that article detailed the extent of discrimination faced by Muslims,...

-Newsclick.in Three transformative steps could dramatically change this dire situation – provided Modi Govt. has the will to take them. Wage growth of households has declined from 8.2% in 2012-2016 to 5.7% in 2017-2021, according to a fresh study by a ratings agency. It will actually be even lower – around 1% - if inflation is taken into account. This slowing down of wage growth has happened in both rural and urban...

-The Telegraph At present, India has 195 million households with ration cards (nearly 794 million people), lower than the beneficiaries we intended to target in 2013 Inordinate delays in carrying out the census exercise are depriving millions of Indians who rely on rations for their subsistence. The exclusion of the poorest from the public distribution system in the pre and post-pandemic years was first flagged by the economists, Jean Drèze and Reetika...