A new idea is being born in the field of employment guarantee. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) was introduced in 2008 to answer rural unemployment. Now with COVID-19 hitting the country, the idea is born of perhaps an urban counterpart to employment guarantee. The part of this idea has been fleshed out by economist Jean Dreze who gave the original idea for MNREGS as well. Jean Dreze has proposed this more as not a guarantee but state intervention to provide jobs.

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Indian states doesn’t lack ambition, it lacks resources, said Manish Sabharwal, Chairman of Teamlease Services while discussing the urban employee guarantee scheme on CNBC-TV18’s Indianomics.

Cities are very different than villages, a large part of NREGS has been make-work-programme. One needs to think about urban plan a little differently, it needs to be very targeted, it should be only attracted to the vulnerable, it needs to be finite and affordable, he said.

“I think that India cannot afford to act like the US, which is running a fiscal deficit more than India’s gross domestic product (GDP) but of course the fiscal intervention will be needed and cities are becoming the engines of economic activity. So in the medium-term because of global factors, because of India’s reforms, I think India’s prospects are much higher than when we were going into the pandemic,” said Sabharwal.

“Something like an urban intervention might be interesting but I would propose it as a reimbursement or a wage subsidy. NREGS is a job, not a wage subsidy,” Sabharwal mentioned.

First Published:Oct 14, 2020 8:03 PM IST