Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Employment generation under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) increased by a handsome 28.8 per cent to 277.5 million person days in April 2023. This growth was higher than the 5.6 per cent increase recorded in the previous month. Employment generated under MGNREGS increased substantially by close to 62.1 million person days in April, compared to 11.4 million person days that were generated...

Scroll.in Though the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act) has refocussed attention on school education in recent years, some fundamental problems continue to plague the system. Despite the constitutional and legal obligations of governments, education budgets have remained modest and woefully inadequate to requirements. While there has been a reasonable expansion of coverage and enrolment in schools, the fundamental issue of poor learning outcomes, especially...

The Hindu Businessline India’s urea production has surged by 25.6 per cent during the first month of the current fiscal to 23.45 lakh tonnes (lt), thanks to the revival of four closed plants in the public sector at Gorakhpur, Sindri, Barauni, and Ramagundam. However, sales were lower at 11.77 lt in April from year-ago, which indicates its comfortable availability as farmers normally rush to store the crop nutrient ahead of sowing...

People's Archive of Rural India Marudupudi Nagaraju has a three-acre mango orchard in Pomula Bheemavaram village in Andhra Pradesh. A daily wage worker of the Madiga community, this land was assigned to him around 25 years ago by the state government. It was done in a move by the state to redistribute land among the landless classes introduced under the Andhra Pradesh Land Reforms (Ceiling on Agricultural Holdings) Act, 1973. hen...

KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...