Legal backing a must to make urban employment schemes effective: Activists

Other features of an ideal scheme include adequate funding to boost Urban Local Bodies, minimum wages for workers, and exclusion of contractors from projects, among other things

A few weeks back, Rajasthan became the sixth state in the country to announce plans to start an urban employment guarantee programme on the lines of MGNREGA for the poor.

Though the broad guidelines of the schemes are still being worked out, the allocation of about Rs 800 crore shows that the state government does not want it to be just another populist move that stays largely on paper, civil society activists said.

Before, Rajasthan, five other states--Jharkhand, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh--had initiated their own urban employment guarantee schemes.

Of these, Kerala has perhaps the longest serving