India’s rural healthcare infrastructure needs to be strengthened to handle the pandemic effectively. Explain (200 Words)
Refer - Financial Express
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 4 years
KEY POINTS
· Inferential Survey Statistics and Research Foundation (ISS&RF)conducted the survey, of the migrants who left cities and industrial towns for their native villages and small towns, 35.4 per cent had no employment.
· 35.8 per cent were involved in agriculture as self-employed (SE) labour, on their joint family farms,
· 9.7 per cent worked as agriculture labour, 4.6 per cent in MNREGA and and 12.2 per cent as casuals in other non-agriculture work.
· Phase-1 of our survey showed that less than 5 per cent of migrants availed of MGNREGA, which increased to 7.7 per cent in phase-2. Obviously, MGNREGA as a strategy to provide employment has not succeeded.
· The survey also revealed that only 1.75 per cent of migrants had Jan Dhan accounts and 28.37 per cent had some other bank account.
· These results indicate that existing government programmes cannot provide gainful employment opportunities to the migrants at their native places.
· Engaging returning migrants in building new agri-value chains has some potential to create productive employment and protect livelihoods.
· Government godowns are overflowing with excess grain stocks, and it may be useful to distribute at least a part of this to benefit migrant workers rather than incur high costs of maintaining these stocks.
· Garib Kalyan Yojana can also be extended to migrants to help them remain in their cities of their work.
