It is the season of rights in Indian public policy. The Right to Education—a piece of legislation that essentially nationalises 25% of private school capacity—will soon be joined by the Right to Food. A somewhat flippant but not unthinkable solution to India’s horrible sanitation problems could require every house to make 25% of their bathroom capacity available to people who don’t have their own.

...

NREG will spend more than Rs 1,50,000 crore over five years.

...

NREG is a massive ‘make work’ scheme whose numbers will improve if we take away the beneficiaries shovels and give them spoons. Even if we don’t consider the obvious transmission losses of corruption in the massive delivery system—more money would have reached if it had been dropped from helicopters—the biggest problems arise from the inability of NREG’s 100-day job to deliver productivity enhancing assets or an employability corridor that builds skills.

... ...

No democracy on this planet has ever dealt with the fire hose of people that India faces; we will add one million people to our labour force every month for the next 20 years. While we can learn from the experience of other countries, nobody else has confronted the impossible trinity of cost, quality and scale. We need massive innovation in how we match jobs to candidates, how we para-skill our trainers, how we blend the four classroom factors of instructor, satellite, e-learning and apprenticeships, and how we finance skill development.

...

A 100-day job under NREG violates more than 37 labour laws: minimum wages, contract labour, ESI, EPFO, etc. So the government—unlike Left parties and trade unions—seems to recognise that the good is not the enemy of the great and a job is better than no job. But any state intervention programme in labour markets that ignores the issue of labour law reform ignores the very real costs of our current regime; unorganised employment, capital substitution and corruption. The labour law issue is important to the poverty and skill issue because it is very difficult—if not impossible—to sustain third party financing of skill development unless it leads to organised employment. So any innovative, sustainable and scalable state intervention in labour markets lies at the intersection of employment and unemployment. NREG fails this test. MES passes. I never imagined I’d be writing this but isn’t it time to give the ministry of labour more money?