-News18.com The report states that women are much worse affected than men because they have higher unemployment rates as well as lower labour force participation rates. Bengaluru: India’s unemployment reached its highest at 6 per cent in 2018, double of what it was in the decade between 2000 and 2010. According to a report by Azim Premji University's Centre for Sustainable Employment, 50 lakh people lost their jobs after Narendra Modi’s...

-The Hindu The provision of health, education and public services matters more than income support schemes It is by now close to 50 years since Indira Gandhi brought the idea of eradicating poverty into the electoral arena in India. ‘Garibi Hatao’ had been her slogan. She actually took the country some distance in the promised direction. Though it had not come close to being eradicated in her time, it was under her...

-The Telegraph Demand for work under the MGNREGA was at its highest in the 2018-19 fiscal The job crisis has deepened and become more commonplace during the last five years, according to officials familiar with employment data. Consider this: Demand for work under the national job scheme, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), was at its highest in the 2018-19 fiscal. Started in 2006 to provide a fallback employment source to...

-The Indian Express An urban employment guarantee programme is an idea whose time has come. Temperatures are rapidly warming up in what promises to be a blistering summer of India’s electioneering. Amidst the belligerent grandstanding on national security and the communal messaging barely below the surface, Rahul Gandhi’s announcement of a minimum income guarantee scheme came as a relief, if only because it tried to steer the public discussions to the...

-The Indian Express Congress manifesto should have promised better implementation of MGNREGA instead of another scheme In its previous ruling stint in New Delhi, the Congress’s flagship social welfare programme was MGNREGA, which provides 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. For its next shot at power, the grand old party is promising to implement a...