More than five years have passed since the world’s largest employment programme was launched in India. The scale of employment generated was not the only reason that this is a path breaking legislation. The MGNREGA is the first national law to establish rights in the development sector. It is demand based, and not constrained by arbitrary and restrictive selections like the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. Any person living in a...

A thinking government, regional or central, would ensure sustainable wages for skilled artisans and help them market the handcrafted products, instead of letting them join the NREGS queue. The design and execution of the much-touted National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) are likely to leave a lasting impact on some areas of our economy. Surely, the prototype version did not foresee that it would act as a catalyst for changes that...

-PTI   The head of South Africa’s powerful federation of trade unions has asked the government to consider replicating the model of India’s rural employment guarantee scheme MNERGA to address the huge unemployment problem in the country. Mr Zwelinzima Vavi, head of the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), believes that the model used in India could also work in South Africa. Speaking at a University of Johannesburg seminar around constitutional...

The farmers' struggle against land acquisition only shows that from passive forms of protest they have turned to active forms of resistance. THE recent agitation by farmers in Uttar Pradesh against cropland acquisition for non-agricultural purposes is only the latest in a long series of protests by farmers and rural communities, which started a decade ago in different parts of the country and which gathered momentum over the past five...

The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...