With spiralling food prices affecting the purchasing power of earnings received by NREGA workers, the government has decided to set up an expert group to link wages of these workers to changes in prices.

"We will give real wages to NREGA workers. The real wage of Rs 100 had been fixed when food prices were normal. Now, prices have gone high and whatever NREGA workers are earning now is comparatively less," Rural Development Minister C P Joshi said.

"So we have written to the ministry of statistics and programme implementation to constitute an expert group to look into the issue of creating a separate wage index for NREGA," he said.

CEGC members Jean Drez and Aruna Roy has suggested the ministry that wage index for NREGA should be linked to consumer price index so that NREGA workers remain unaffected by inflation.