Cost of living has gone up but MGNREGA wages remain the same

Even as the rural employment programme provides low wages, it is a source of income and opportunity for women who have few other avenues of work in rural India and face barriers in migrating out of the village for work

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|27 Aug 2022 11:43 AM IST

Shankar Singh, co-founder of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, a labour rights' organisation in Rajasthan, that works closely on MGNREGA.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has consistently bucked the trend of declining labour force participation of women in India. All India participation of women in the labour force was 25.1% between 2020-21, while it was 53.19% under MGNREGA. What makes MGNREGA acceptable to the female workforce? And what has been its impact in the last 17 years on the lives of women in India? Sunaina Kumar explores in our second story of Women at Work 3.0.

Read full story here.

Sunaina Kumar is a journalist and researcher. She works with the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi and focuses on gender. She is currently a Maitri Fellow at the Institute for Global Development, University of New South Wales in Sydney.

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