-ThePrint.in In ‘Labouring women’, economist Jayati Ghosh writes about what Indian policymakers are getting wrong in their measure of poverty. Among the various aspects of deprivation related to poverty and inequality, one aspect which has seldom attracted the attention of scholars and policy-makers equally is that of time poverty. Ignoring this important dimension actually results from a related and possibly more substantive deficiency: the inadequate conception of what constitutes work that underlies...

-The Hindu The reported contraction of the economy is likely an underestimate for reasons of omission and commission According to data released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Government of India on August 31, 2020, real quarterly GDP contracted by a whopping 23.9% between April-June 2019 and April-June 2020. This magnitude of real GDP decline is unprecedented since the country started publishing quarterly GDP estimates in 1996. This...

-The Hindu The World Bank’s decision to halt its annual ‘Doing Business’ report on data authenticity issues has major implications On Thursday, the World Bank halted its annual publication, ‘Doing Business’ report, as it detected irregularities of data for a few countries. A World Bank Press release of August 27 said: “The integrity and impartiality of our data and analysis is paramount and so we are immediately taking the following actions. We...

-Livemint.com A Mint analysis suggests that the CMIE figures should not be considered a proxy for the official unemployment and labour force participation rates As the country went under lockdown, and everything, including the collection of statistics, came to a halt, analysts and economists were left scrambling for data to seize up just how badly the economy was doing. One dataset that has come to the rescue is the nationally representative employment-unemployment...

-TwoCircles.net Centre for Equity Studies has released a report on the migrant crisis documenting how India’s most vulnerable class has suffered due to the unplanned national lockdown by the Central government for COVID-19. The report titled ‘Labouring Lives: Hunger, Precarity and Despair amid Lockdown’ addressed vital questions of how the country’s labouring class – stranded and jobless – coped with the lockdown living away from their homes. The research has been conducted...