-The Telegraph Poverty research pioneer cites US, UK and EU experience; Niti Aayog vice-chairman disagrees, says there’s no guarantee ‘helicopter money’ will lead to spending Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee has stepped up to the firing line by arguing the government should make bigger direct cash payments under the MGNREGA scheme to help people who have slid into poverty due to the pandemic. The government has already indicated it’s not keen on larger direct...

-Hindustan Times The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has witnessed the sharpest year-on-year increase in employment generation in its history in April 2021, government data shows, in a sign that the second Covid wave has caused major reverse migration adding to rural economic distress. According to rural development ministry data, around 22 million households have got work under the job guarantee in the month of April 2021, which is...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-The Telegraph Published by the University of Bonn in Germany, the findings are significant at a time workers have again begun returning home amid a Covid resurgence in India The rural job guarantee scheme and the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Yojana provided work to less than eight per cent of the migrant workers who had returned home after last year’s lockdown, a study has found. It has argued that the highly skilled returned migrants...

Although services provided by the gig and platform workers touch the lives of each one of us, we have little knowledge about the role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work. Such digital labour platforms have created unprecedented opportunities for workers, businesses and society. However, they also pose serious threats to decent work and fair competition. A recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) shows that the...