DAILY MINIMUM WAGES

Subject: Economy

Context: Govt must look into scheme for those who lost jobs amid lockdown: Report

Concept:

The Delhi government should consider launching a scheme guaranteeing jobs at a fixed minimum daily wage to tackle the alarming surge in the city’s unemployment rate during the pandemic-induced lockdown, according to an official document.
The unemployment rate in Delhi rose from 11.1% in January-February 2020 to 28.5% in October-November, according to a Delhi government-commissioned survey.
The survey, prepared jointly by the Delhi Directorate of Economics and Statistics and the Centre for Market Research and Social Development.
It says the government is planning to launch a scheme to provide guaranteed jobs for a few months in a year at minimum wages of Rs 569 per day to one adult member of a household in Delhi.
Economist Jean Dreze, one of the architects of the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, had last September proposed that an urban jobs guarantee scheme should be considered to help people tide over the widespread lockdown-induced distress.

National Rural Employment Programme (NREP, 1980)

The National Rural Employment Programme was launched in 1980 as an anti-poverty and anti-unemployment program.
The aim was to develop key assets, such as fisheries, fuel and energy plantations and fodder and pasture development plantations by mobilizing unemployed and under-employed laborers.
It was also hoped that the project would succeed in the development of homestead projects for the home-less alongside essential economic infrastructures, such as godowns, banks and workshops for the beneficiaries.