-Livemint.com Beset by poor technology access and ineffective online classes, students from poor households have lost reading abilities significantly, suggests a new survey covering 15 states. The losses are much more stark for students from marginalized communities With most Indian schools shut for the past year and a half, children from poor households, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, are rapidly forgetting what they had learned before the pandemic, new survey data suggests. Less...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-The Hindu Business Line Millions of urban Indian residents are struggling without livelihood opportunities. A national urban employment scheme needs to be put in place immediately At long last — and more than a year after the need for such a scheme became obvious — a Parliamentary committee has recommended the institution of an urban employment scheme at the national level. The Standing Committee on Labour stated in its report of August 3,...

-Newsclick.in Besides the dire jobs situation, what is even more distressing is falling income from surviving jobs. People in India are in the grip of a severe income crisis brought on by myopic government policies and aggravated by mismanagement of the pandemic. Part of this economic collapse is because the absolute number of jobs has shrunk. Another part – not much talked about – is because of low incomes from existing jobs. This...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...