-Hindustan Times According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the number of the employed fell from 399.38 million in July to 397.78 million in August, with nearly 1.3 million job losses in rural India alone. Over 1.5 million people from both the formal and informal sectors lost their jobs in August, reversing some of the gains made in July, as the unemployment rate rose in rural and urban India. According to the...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-The Hindu It is time to formulate a wage employment-based national urban livelihood scheme similar to MGNREGS During the pandemic, we have again and again faced the difficult choice of saving lives versus protecting livelihoods. According to the World Economic Outlook report of April, 2021 of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), almost all countries, except China, experienced economic contraction last year. The global GDP shrunk by 3.3%. The contraction in the U.S.,...

-The Hindu There is evidence to suggest that the PLFS data may underestimate the loss of earnings and fall in consumption The third annual round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data conducted during July 2019-June 2020 was released recently. The PLFS captures key indicators of the labour market such as the labour force participation rate (LFPR) — the proportion of population working or seeking work; worker-population ratio (WPR) — the...

-The Hindu ‘Pandemic has made matters worse for women, the young, self-employed, migrants’. Direct transfer of money into bank accounts of informal workers and an urban employment guarantee scheme were among the recommendations of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour in its report on the impact of the pandemic on rising unemployment and job loss. The report, which was presented in the Lok Sabha and tabled in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, said:...