What impact have late wage payments had on NREGS. workers? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. What impact have late wage payments had on NREGS. workers?

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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.Delays of several months in National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) wage payments and work sites where laborers have lost all hope of being paid at all have become the norm in many states. How are workers who exist on the margins of subsistence supposed to feed their families? Under the scheme, workers must be paid writhing 15 days, failing which they are entitled to compensation under the Payment of Wages Act-upto Rs. 3,000 per aggrieved worker. In reality, compensation is received in only a few isolated instances.It is often argued by officials that the main reason for the delay is the inability of banks and post offices to handle mass payments of NREGS wages. Though there is a grain of truth in this, as a diagnosis it is misleading. The ‘jam’ in the banking system has been the result of the hasty switch to bank payments imposed by the Central Government against the recommendation of the Central Employment Guarantee Council which advocated a gradual transition starting with villages relatively close to the nearest bank.However delays are not confined solely to the banking system. Operational hurdles include implementing agencies taking more than fifteen days to issue payment orders, viewing of work measurement as a cumbersome process resulting in procrastination by the engineering staff and non-maintenance of muster rolls and job cards etc. But behind these delays lies a deeper and deliberate ‘backlash’ against the NREGS. With bank payments making it much harder to embezzle NREGS funds, the programme is seen as a headache by many government functionaries-the workload has remained without the “inducements”. Slowing down wage payments is a convenient way of sabotaging the scheme because, workers will desert NREGS work-sites.The common sense solution advocated by the government is to adopt the business correspondent model wherein bank agents will go to villages to make cash payments and duly record them on handheld electronic devices. This solution is based on the wrong diagnosis that distance separating villages from banks is the main issue. In order to accelerate payment, clear timeliness for every step of the payment process should be incorporated into the system as Programme Officers often have no data on delays and cannot exert due pressure to remedy the situation. Workers are both clueless and powerless with no provision for them to air their grievances and seek redress. In drought affected areas the system of piece rate work can be dispensed with, where work measurement is not completed within a week and wages may be paid on the basis of attendance. Buffer funds can be provided to gram panchayats and post offices to avoid bottlenecks in the flow of funds. Partial advances could also be considered provided wage payments are meticulously tracked. But failure to recognize problems and unwillingness to remedy them will remain major threats to the NREGS.Which of the following factors has not been responsible for untimely payment of NREGS wages?
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MCQ-> Read the following passage and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases in the passage have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.Marc Rodin flicked-off the switch of his transistor radio and rose from the table, leaving the breakfast tray almost untouched. He walked over to the window, lit another in the endless chain of cigarettes and gazed out at the snow-en-crusted landscape which the late arriving spring had not yet started to dismantle. He murmured a word quietly and with great venom, following up with other strong nouns and epithets that expressed his feeling towards the French President, his Government and the Action Service. Rodin was unlike his predecessor in almost every way. Tall and spare, with a cadaverous face hollowed by the hatred within, he usually masked his emotions with an un-Latin frigidity. For him there had been no Ecole Polytechnic to open doors to promotion. The son of a cobbler, he had escaped to England by fishing boat in the halcyon days of his late teens when the Germans overran France, and had enlisted as a private soldier under the banner of the Cross of Lorraine. Promotion through sergeant to warrant officer had come the hard way, in bloody battles across the face on North Africa under Koenig and later through the hedgerows of Normandy with Leclerc. A field commission during the fight for Paris had got him the officer’s chevrons his education and breeding could never have obtained and in post-war France the choice had been between reverting to civilian life or staying in the Army. But revert to what ? He had no trade but that of cobbler which his father had taught him, and he found the working class of his native country dominated by Communists, who had also taken over the Resistance and the Free French of the Interior. So he stayed in the Army, later to experience the bitterness of an officer from the ranks who saw a new young generation of educated boys graduating from the officer schools, earning in theoretical lessons carried out in classrooms the same chevrons he had sweated blood for. As he wanted them pass him in tank and privilege the bitterness started to set in. There was only one thing left to do, and that was join one of the colonial regiments, the tough crack soldiers who did the fighting while the conscript army paraded round drill squares. He managed a transfer to the colonial para-troops. Within a year he had been a company commander in Indo-China, living among other men who spoke and thought as he did. For a young man from a cobbler’s bench, promotion could still be obtained through combat, and more combat. By the end of the Indo-China campaign he was a major and after an unhappy and frustrating year in France he was sent to Algeria. The French withdrawal from Indo-China do the year he spent in France had turned his latent bitterness into a consuming loathing of politicians and Communists, whom he regarded as one and the same thing. Not until Franco was ruled by a soldier could she ever be weaned away from the grip of the treators and lickspittles who permeated her public life. Only in the Army were both breeds extinct. Like most combat officers who had seen their men die and occasionally buried the hideously mutilated bodies of those unlucky enough to be taken alive. Rodin worshipped soldiers as the true salt of the earth, the men who sacrificed themselves in blood so that the bourgeoisie could live at home in comfort. To learn from the civilians of native land after eight years of combat in the forests of Indo-China that most of them cared not a fig for the soldier, to read the denunciations of the military by the left-wing intellectuals for more trifles like the toturing of prisoners to obtain vital information, had set off inside Marc Rodin a reaction which combined with the native bitterness stemming from his own lack of opportunity, had turned into zealotry. He remained convinced that given enough backing by the civil authoritieS on the spot and the Government and people back home, the Army could have beaten the Viet-Minh. The cession of Indo-China had been a massive betrayal of the thousands of fine young men who had died there seemingly for nothing. For Rodin there would be, could be, no more betrayals. Algeria would prove it. He left the shore of Marseilles in the spring of 1956 as ner a happy man as he would ever be, convinced that the distant hills of Algeria would see the consummation of what he regarded as his life’s work, the apotheosis of the French Army in the eys of the world.What was the period when Rodin escaped to England ?
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MCQ-> I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, if even it’s a pin.Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopaedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.A suitable title to the passage would be
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MCQ-> Read the following case and choose the best alternative.Chetan Textile Mills (CTM) has initiated various employee welfare schemes for its employees since the day the mill began its operations. Due to its various welfare initiatives and socially responsible business practices, the organisation has developed an impeccable reputation. Majority of the regular workers in Chetan Mills had membership of Chetan Mills Mazdoor Sangh (CMMS), a non political trade union. CMMS had the welfare of its member as its guiding principle. Both CTM and CMMS addressed various worker related issues on a proactive basis. As a result no industrial dispute had been reported from the organiza tion in the recent past.These days majority of the employers deploy large number of contract labourers in their production processes. In an open economy survival of an organization depends on its competitiveness. In order to become competitive, an organization must be able to reduce cost and have flexibility in employment of resources. Engaging workers through contractors (contract labourer) reduces the overall labour cost by almost 50%. Indian labour legislations make reduction of regular workers almost impossible, but organisations can overcome this limitation by employing contract labourers. Contract labourers neither get the same benefit as regular employees nor do they have any job security. According to various recent surveys, government owned public sector units and other departments are the biggest employers of contract labourers in the country. Contractors, as middle - men, often exploit the contract labourers, and these government organizations have failed to stop the exploitation.Over time CTM started engaging a large number of contract labourers. At present, more than 35% of CM’s workers (total 5,000 in number) are contract labourers. CMMS leadership was wary about the slow erosion of its support base as regular workers slowly got replaced by contract workers and feared the day when regular workers would become a minority in the mill. So far, CMMS has refused to take contract labourers as members.Recently, based on rumours, CTM management started to investigate the alleged exploitation of contract labourers by certain contractors. Some contractors felt that such investigations may expose them and reduce their profit margin. They instigated contract labourers to demand for better wages. Some of the contract labourers engaged in material handling and cleaning work started provoking CTM management by adopting violent tactics.Today’s news - paper reports that police and CTM security guards fired two or three rounds in air to quell the mob. The trouble started while a security guard allegedly slapped one of the contract labourers following a heated argument. Angry labourers set fire to several vehicles parked inside the premises, and to the police jeeps.In the wake of recent happenings, what decision is expected from CTM management? From the combinations given below, choose the best sequence of action. I. Stop the current investigation against the contractors to ensure industrial peace; after all allegations were based on rumours. II. Continue investigation to expo se exploitation and take strong actions against trouble makers. III. Get in direct touch with all contract labourers through all possible means, communicate the need for current investigation to stop their exploitation, and convince them regarding CTM’s situation due to competition. Also expose those contractors who are creating problems. IV. Promise strong action against the security guards who are guilty. V. Increase the wages of contract labourers.....

MCQ->What impact have late wage payments had on NREGS. workers?....