Mumbai : Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan has dismissed the notion that the rural employment guarantee programme is behind the massive spurt in wages in rural areas, reports PTI.
“On the NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), there is clearly a lot of sense that this has increased rural wages tremendously. I would argue that clean, trustworthy studies say that the effect was may be 10 per cent,” Rajan told an audience here last week.
It is other factors such as rise in minimum support price of food items, better realisations for food commodities in the international markets, shift of labour to the building industry due to a spurt in construction activity, coupled with a gradual withdrawal of women from the workforce due to a myriad of reasons, have caused the spike in wages, he said.
“Women instead of working in fields or working as agricultural labourers at the younger end have gone to schools and at the older end moved back into households. That is not an entirely bad development; in fact that reflects the greater wealth in rural areas,” Rajan said. Many experts have been blaming the wage guarantee programme started by the previous UPA regime for the rise in rural wages.
