-The Indian Express There is a mounting employment crisis in India. The current growth model, built on large private investments, cannot address the problem. Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan raised many hackles with his demand for affirmative action or job reservations for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates in the private sector. He suggested that “providing quota in private jobs will help cool down anger among SC and STs”, thereby stemming...

-The Indian Express The percentage of the adult population for four large developing countries — China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria — who are living in cities, as well as the change in this percentage between 1975 and 2000, are plotted in chart. Rural-urban migration is exceptionally low in India. Changes in the rural and urban population between decennial censuses over the period 1961-2001 indicate that the migration rate for working age...

-The Hindu TrustID has been developed by Swabhimaanya, registered authentication user agency with UIDAI Whether hiring a domestic help or taking a cab, authenticating the identity of a person is a big challenge in India. A newly-launched mobile application aims to fill this gap by enabling such verifications using Aadhaar. The application — TrustID — has been developed by Swabhimaanya, which is a registered authentication user agency with the Unique Identification Authority of...

-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...

-The Indian Express Processes of knowledge diffusion reinforce inequalities. We need explicit pro-poor targeting of efforts There is much enthusiasm today for efforts to improve access to information about poor people’s rights and entitlements. In a much-debated recent example, Facebook’s “Free Basics” platform aimed to provide free access to a selected slice of the internet (including, of course, Facebook). In arguing for Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg said that “everyone… deserves access to...