-The Indian Express The low training participation was mostly due to financial barriers and time constraints, with each category cited by a third of youth respondents. Seventy per cent of youth are unaware of government-run skill development programmes in their area, yet more than seventy per cent are very interested in pursuing skills training, according to a “Young India and Work” study by the Observer Research Foundation and World Economic Forum. The findings,...

-National Herald Two years after the disastrous demonetisation, the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister—even the fawning media— no longer speak of the ‘Demonetisation Dividend’. There has been none Two years back, on November 8, at around 8.30 pm, the Prime Minister of India, with his characteristic love for drama, unleashed on the country what he had then claimed was the one silver bullet which would eliminate the triple evils of...

-The Telegraph The obsession with economic growth and the stock market hides other important facts about the condition of the economy Every time quarterly or monthly reports of the Indian economy are announced there is a reaction in the media. If the results are worse than the previous ones, then impending doom is forecast. If the results are better than the previous ones, there is unbridled optimism about future economic prospects. Both...

-The Hindu Business Line Hounded for her documentary on the horrors of manual scavenging, filmmaker Divya Bharathi holds up a mirror to social indifference A conspiracy of silence — that’s how filmmaker Divya Bharathi describes the uneasy quiet that shrouds the death of men and children in sewage tanks. Earlier this month, when six men choked to death in Delhi, the reaction was on expected lines — nothing beyond knee-jerk moves, she...

-Newsclick.in It is bizarre that the recent GDP numbers are being celebrated even as there are no jobs, workers wages are frozen and farmers are demanding better prices. There is much celebration in government circles and, of course, in the mainstream media, that in the first quarter of 2018-19 (April to June 2018), the GDP growth rate picked up to touch 8.2% compared with the same quarter last year (April to June...