Does Rajasthan's Wage Employment Scheme Tick All The Boxes?

Rajasthan's attempt to provide income security to urban poor shows challenges of designing a wage guarantee scheme for towns and cities

- Jugal Mohapatra And Siraj Hussain

Some recent events in the political arena signal that unemployment, particularly among the youth, has emerged as a major issue of concern for the parties in power at the Centre and states. Early this year, during the elections to five state assemblies, media reports highlighted that young voters were disappointed at the shrinking opportunities for gainful jobs. Probably this prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce in June that the government would recruit a million candidates in various jobs over the next one and a half years. Soon after, in July, in a somewhat different policy response, the Rajasthan government launched the Indira Gandhi Shahari Rozgar Yojana (IRGY-Urban) which is aimed at providing supplementary employment and livelihood support to the urban poor.

It may be recalled that large-scale job losses, particularly among the migrant workers in large cities during the strict lockdown imposed in the first wave of COVID-19, had triggered the demand for such a scheme in urban areas by several well-known economists and policy analysts. More recently, the Standing Committee on Labour in its report of August 3, 2021, also recommended an urban employment guarantee programme for the urban workforce in line with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The chairperson of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council Bibek Debroy had also endorsed this idea while releasing a report, "The State of Inequality in India", in May 2022.

Surprisingly, all these discussions made hardly any reference to our past experience in implementing such a centrally sponsored scheme, Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana (SJSRY), which was launched in 1997 and continued till 2013.