-The Tribune The prices of essential food items have increased by 50% in seven years, whereas the real wage rate has risen by 22%. These figures show that inflation has outsmarted the real income of the poor, making their lives miserable as the food basket constitutes a substantial proportion of the total expenditure on the poor. The net effect is that the poor earn less and take loans to maintain the...
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Inertia or economics? Why Punjab’s farmers can’t move beyond rice and wheat -Shweta Saini and Siraj Hussain
-ThePrint.in Diversification is critical for Punjab and Haryana farmers who face the challenge of depleting water tables. We need another agricultural revolution. Every time we visit Punjab, we ask farmers why they stick with the rice-wheat cropping pattern year on year. Especially when most are witnessing receding underground water levels, forcing them to deepen their borewells each year during the paddy season. One answer from a young farmer stayed with us. He...
More »Civil society members are unhappy with the abysmal rise in notified wage rates for MGNREGA in FY 2022-23
-Joint Press Note released by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha network and People’s Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) dated March 31, 2022 The wage rates for NREGA workers for FY 2022-23 were notied on 28.03.2022. The notication of the wage rate has been extremely late, with only 3 days remaining for the beginning of the next nancial year. Such a delay prevents any discussion or debate regarding the wage rates or their adequacy....
More »Real wage rates of the rural workers hardly increased during the last 6 years
In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...
More »Rural Distress Makes India Inc. Call for Higher MGNREGA Allocation -Rabindra Nath Sinha
-Newsclick.in By doing so, the corporate sector seems to have cautioned the government against expecting a fast rebound in industrial activity, as there is sizeable idle capacity in the absence of consumption demand. Kolkata: Rural stress and funds for the rural job guarantee scheme were surprise additions in the organised corporate sector’s listed points for the post-Budget interaction with the Union government held on February 5 under the aegis of the Confederation...
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