-Economic and Political Weekly One knows who will suffer if the Narendra Modi government succeeds in weakening MGNREGA. The largest public employment programme the world has ever seen is in trouble. In 2013-14, 74 million individuals in 48 million households in rural India were employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act programme (or MGNREGA as it is called), with each household on average finding work for 46 days. This...

-The Telegraph The National Democratic Alliance government is planning to scrap the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The chief minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, had already asked for the employment programme of the MGNREGA under which the state was obliged to provide employment on demand (failing which an unemployment allowance of a specified amount had to be paid), to be downgraded to a mere "food-for-work" programme, where the state...

-The Business Standard Scheme faces pincer attack with a proposed higher proportion of expenditure on material, reducing the budget available to pay wages The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) faces a pincer attack under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, with parallel moves promising to shrink and mutate the nature of the scheme. Two of the moves have been revealed - a proposed higher proportion of expenditure on material,...

-The Business Standard   NC Saxena, a former member of the National Advisory Council believes that the regulatory regime in the states continues to be oppressive. In an e-mailed interview with Aditi Phadnis, Saxena says that the fundamental problem in India is the low tax-GDP ratio and neither the last government nor the current one seems interested in increasing revenues. Edited excerpts: * The new government appears to be watering down a lot...

-The Hindu ‘The government has taken steps to destroy MGNREGA, an act that gives purchasing power to the rural poor, following prejudicial contentions of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders' It's no secret that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) does not like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. MGNREGA is perhaps the only law in the world which guarantees 100 days of wage employment a year to one member of a rural...