 "jobs, jobless, unemployment, economy, hiring, workers, staff, employees, mgnrega, poor, welfare, poverty")
Prem Lal, 39, has had a horrid time since the national lockdown in 2020. Soon after the announcement in March, like many stranded migrant workers, he made the arduous journey back home. He walked nearly 1,200 km from Pune, where he worked as a painter, to his village in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh's economically deprived Bundelkhand region. Since then he has found a few weeks of wage employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the national rural jobs programme.
"If work was available for most part of the year under schemes like MGNREGS then I
