-TheWire.in A claim of an 8.4% real GDP growth rate has little relevance even as rural India battles plummeting wage levels, depleted incomes and widespread unemployment. With the release of the GDP figures for the quarter ending September, the government machinery has been in full swing advancing the narrative that economic growth is indeed back on track. However, sorely missing from these narratives is the inconvenient factoid on the currently dismal state of...

-IdeasforIndia.com The Centre has sought an additional Rs. 25,000 crore as funding for MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Based on simple calculations using official data, Ashwini Kulkarni contends that the actual fund requirement is in fact much higher. As the pandemic continues to adversely impact rural livelihoods, the government should allocate sufficient funds to MNREGA, in order to honour the work-on-demand guarantee. For over a month, national and local...

-Hindustan Times The headline unemployment rate in the March 2021 quarter was 9.4%. This is the lowest since the quarter ending June 2020, which coincided with the 68-day long nation-wide lockdown which was imposed on March 25, 2020. Could the Covid-19 pandemic have left long-term scars on India’s labour markets? The findings of the January-March round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), released on November 30, by the National Statistical Office...

The virility of Muslim men vis-à-vis men from other religious communities have often been used as a political tool and to create a divisive agenda just before elections for getting votes from the majority of the Indian electorate who are Hindus. Instead of focusing on positive agendas like human development, employment generation, and poverty reduction, political campaigns just before the elections oftentimes reduce to mere communal propaganda (when a lot...

-The Hindu There is a lack of recent data on the representation of various communities in education and employment The Madras High Court’s recent verdict of quashing the 10.5% special reservation for Vanniyakula Kshatriyas within the overall 20% quota for Most Backward Classes (MBC) and Denotified Communities (DNC) has again highlighted the importance of quantifiable data as a prerequisite for reservation in education and employment. Adopted on the last day of the previous...