-IndiaToday.in The Modi govt has told Parliament it does not have data of migrant workers who died during the lockdown. India Today sheds light on data documenting those who died while desperately trying to reach their homes. While presenting the Union Budget 2020 in Parliament on February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman outlined the importance of data and said that in order to meet challenges of real-time monitoring of India's increasingly complex...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...

-Business Standard Unemployment rate in the country will rise to a staggering 32.5 per cent, but will be higher in Sri Lanka at 37.8 per cent As many as 6.1 million young people (15-24 years) may lose jobs in India in 2020 if the containment of the virus takes six months (roughly till September), says a report by Asian Development Bank (ADB) and International Labour Organisation (ILO). India will be followed by Pakisan,...

-TheWire.in/ PTI The young people's employment prospects in Asia and the Pacific are severely challenged due to the pandemic, the report found. New Delhi: As many as 41 lakh youth in the country lost jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic while construction and farm sector workers account for the majority of job losses, according to a joint report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). “For India, the...

Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...