Jobless graduates look for MGNREGA works in Uttar Pradesh: Report
Graduates and post-graduates in Uttar Pradesh, who have lost their livelihoods in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, are now willing to take up works that are mostly done by the unskilled labourers under the rural employment scheme of the government, reports said.
Graduates and post-graduates in Uttar Pradesh, who lost their livelihoods in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, are now willing to take up works that are mostly done by unskilled labourers under the rural employment scheme of the government MGNREGA, reported NDTV.
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) aims to provide at least 100 days of wage employment every year to adults willing to do unskilled manual labour work like digging ponds and laying rural roads.
But why would graduates sign up for such work?
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown has taken a toll on the livelihoods of people, not just for the daily wagers and the unskilled sector, but also in other fields due to the economic fallout of the shutdown. And people are now in desperate need for jobs to sustain their lives.
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Roshan Kumar, who hails from an Uttar Pradesh village, is one among them. He holds a MA degree, had a job and reportedly used to earn “decent money”. “But I was asked to leave after the lockdown,” NDTV quoted him as saying. But he is not the only graduate who’s looking for a MGNREGA job.
Satendra Kumar, a graduate in business administration, said he had returned to his village after losing his job that earned him ₹6,000-7,000 per month. “My gram pradhan (village head) helped me get a MGNREGA job,” he was quoted as saying in the report.
Uttar Pradesh, one of the major sources of migrant labourers, has been facing a massive influx of workers during the lockdown period. The state has scaled up the MGNREGA scheme to provide jobs to the workers who have returned during this period, reports said.
The report also quoted a village head in Junaidpur as saying that those who had lost their jobs and livelihoods due to the lockdown, are also applying for these unskilled labour works under the rural employment scheme. It said around 14 crore people have MGNREGA job cards in India.
According to the MGNREGA dashboard, there are about 12.15 crore active workers in the country this fiscal.
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