-Livemint.com Preference for government jobs is highest among college-educated rural youth, a segment seen at the forefront of recent agitations for quotas, shows analysis In one of the largest such exercises ever conducted in the world, millions of applicants are appearing this month for an online recruitment test conducted by the Indian Railways. The Railways Recruitment Board (RRB) has received more than 24 million applications for roughly 120,000 vacancies in the organization. Most...

  A document of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) dated 25th June, 2018 says that the number of members subscribing to the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) scheme gives one an idea of the level of employment in the formal sector viz. mostly employment in establishments employing 20 or more persons (though EPF is applicable for certain organisations, which employ less than 20 persons, subject to certain conditions and...

-The Indian Express The government is looking at various data sources and has started releasing enrolment data for Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) as an indicator. As per latest data, 41.26 lakh enrollments were recorded in the EPFO database for Sept 2017-April 2018. The government is planning to launch enterprise-level area frame survey early next month for capturing employment generation in companies with less than ten workers. The results of the survey,...

-The Hindu Besides the missing informal sector, over-estimation of output growth also offers clues Are the latest employment estimates by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) factually correct? No. They are off the mark, and confined to the economy’s organised or formal sector, accounting at best for 15% of the workforce. Is there a paradox in high output growth rates and the marginal effect on employment? Probably not, if one acknowledges that GDP...

-Firstpost.com Chandigarh: With extensive rice farming in Punjab taking an increasing toll on groundwater reserves and soil health, government agencies are now asking farmers to diversify into profitable allied trades including dairy and pig farming and fisheries. Farmers are also being asked to cultivate crops other than paddy. Farmers in different parts of the state have started growing other, more profitable crops alongside rice. In a break with the fertiliser and pesticide-driven...