After firefighting the controversy over poverty line cut-off, the Congress-led UPA government may find itself in trouble on the matter of NREGS wages. In a judgment late last month, the Karnataka High Court ruled that wages under the UPA’s flagship rural job guarantee scheme “shall not be” less than the minimum wages fixed by state governments under the Minimum Wages (MW) Act. The decision will re-open the tussle between Sonia Gandhi-led National...
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Decadal journeys: debt and despair spur urban growth by P Sainath
The re-classification of villages and towns, and the changes this brings to the nation's rural-urban profile, happens every decade. Yet only Census 2011 shows us a huge turnaround, with urban India adding more people (91 million) than rural India (90.6 million) for the first time in 90 years. Clearly, something huge has happened in the last 10 years that drives those numbers. And that is: huge, uncharted migrations of people...
More »4 million poor women go ‘missing' in developing nations each year: World Bank
-The Hindu Business Line About two-fifths are never born, one-fifth goes missing in infancy and childhood, and remaining two-fifths do so between the ages 15 and 59 There are close to 4 million “missing” poor women in developing countries each year, says a new World Bank report. India accounts for one million of these women. Expressing deep concern at excess female mortality or “missing” females, World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and...
More »Spend Rs 32 a day? Govt says you can't be poor by Dhananjay Mahapatra & Nitin Sethi
The Planning Commission told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that anyone spending more than Rs 965 per month in urban India and Rs 781 in rural India will be deemed not to be poor. Updating the poverty line cut-off figures, the commission said those spending in excess of Rs 32 a day in urban areas or Rs 26 a day in villages will no longer be eligible to draw benefits...
More »Women Hung Out to Dry in Global Labour Market by Kanya D'Almeida
Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force. According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17...
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