Rural employment creating wealth.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) "is a safety net for the rural poor that guarantees 100 days of employment in a year to every registered household." DH. "In FY22, the Center had budgeted Rs 73,000 crore (Rs 730 billion) for MGNREGA but ended up spending almost Rs 98,000 crore (Rs 980 billion) due to continued demand for work." "Demand for work under the MGNREGA scheme, a 'well-accepted' sign of economic distress, continued to be above pre-pandemic levels in the larger part of 2021 and 2022," wrote V Anantha Nageswaran & Deeksha Supyaal Bisht. But, "The share of 'works done on individual's land' (included in the permissible work list in 2009 and expanded since then) has increased from 16% of the total completed works in 2014-15 to 73% in 2021-22. These works include the creation of household assets such as animal sheds, farm ponds, horticulture plantations, vermi-composting pits, etc, in which the beneficiary gets both labor and material costs as per standard rates." This increases household income significantly and reduces rural migration. That is great because "of the nearly 900 million adults of working age, only 45% are either employed or seeking jobs; i.e., they comprise the entire labor force," wrote Ajit Ranade. "Another stark indicator of this jobs drought was revealed in an answer to Parliament, which said that 220 million Indians had applied for about 700,000 government jobs in the last seven years. That's a success rate of 0.33%." Construction can provide work to unskilled and semi-skilled. But, "According to a CMIE (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy) report that analyzed the data between January and April 2022, the level of unemployment among graduates is 17.8 percent." The Hindu. "Rajasthan is a particular outlier where more than half of its graduates - 54.2 percent of them - are unemployed as of April 2022." Those who can try to go overseas. "Even as the student season got delayed by a couple of months this year, the US embassy and its consulates worked overtime to process a record number of applications  and provided visas to to over 55,000 students for the fall semester that is now underway in American universities," wrote Shilpa Menon in November 2021. "India's labor force is getting older and less educated with more than half the workforce comprising middle-aged people when the pandemic struck India, the CMIE said." ET. "India is currently at a tipping point, with the nation having already entered the golden period of 30 years between 2020 and 2050 when the working-age population will bulge." ET. "Yet, more than half of the working population is still unemployable." Perhaps, MGNREGA should be offered to the educated. They can learn to dig pits.