-The Hindu However, suicides among landowning farmers dropped slightly during pandemic year The number of agricultural labourers who died by suicide in 2020 was 18% higher than the previous year, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report released on Thursday. However, suicides among landowning farmers dropped slightly during the pandemic year. The farm sector was one of the few bright spots in the Indian economy last year, recording growth on the...

-The Hindu States creating artificial demand, says official; workers pushed into ‘forced labour’ by delayed payments, say activists The Centre’s flagship rural employment scheme has run out of funds halfway through the financial year, and supplementary budgetary allocations will not come to the rescue for at least another month when the next Parliamentary session begins. According to its own financial statement, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme shows...

-Article-14.com The government has rubbished the 2021 Global Hunger Index report saying it does not reflect reality. But the reality is worse because it reflects India’s own pre-Covid data. Current estimates of foodgrain to various welfare programmes reveal serious under-nutrition and wide gaps in safety nets for poor. Mumbai: Jolted by the overnight choking of all sources of income for her household with the imposition of a nationwide lockdown on 23 March...

-TheWire.in If the Union government thinks that the Global Hunger Index’s methodology is ‘unscientific’, here is another Index that shows a troubling picture for the state of ‘Access Inequality in Basic Amenities’ across India. In the Global Hunger Index (GHI) released last week, India’s ranking slipped seven places to a rank of 101 from 94, in over just a year. The index gives a score on a 100 point scale, where zero...

-Hindustan Times Workers who have registered so far belong to diverse occupations, such as construction, apparel manufacturing, fishing, gig and platform work, street vending as well as domestic work. Nearly half of 40 million workers of the country’s informal economy registered on a recently launched national portal are women, and most workers regardless of gender are from disadvantaged castes, official data that shines new light on India’s invisible unorganised labour force shows. Trends...