THE MNREGA PUSH

Sitting alongside 1,127 fellow migrant workers on a Shramik Special train leaving Kerala for Jharkhand, Mukesh says that though he is deeply worried about his future, he is relieved that if all else fails, he can still find employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme (MNREGA). Once ridiculed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a “living monument of the failures of the UPA”—a quote dredged up by former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Twitter—the scheme has become a source of hope for many returning migrants.

Perhaps acknowledging the need for any port in a storm, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated an extra