New Delhi, Dec. 22 -- India's economy was under $1 trillion when its rural job-guarantee scheme was launched in 2006. Now it's four times that size. By turning the Indian state into an employer of last resort, it created a useful safety net. Now it's in for a relaunch, renamed and rejigged.

While free foodgrain counts as poverty relief too, this open job offer was designed to put money in folks' hands by letting anyone earn a daily wage on demand-with an annual limit of 100 days. The revised version will raise this to 125, but it should ideally have no cap at all-for the sake of universality, its big conceptual plus point.

This is also why farming-season suspensions of 60 days need a rethink. Employers of farm labour competing with a ce...