-The Indian Express The problem is under-employment. It won’t be resolved if the residually-employed are notionally shifted from the informal to formal sector. In an article in January, Soumya Kanti Ghosh and Pulak Ghosh (Ghosh and Ghosh) claimed that seven million new Jobs have been created in the formal sector. Their claim is based on the increase in registration under the Employees Provident Fund (EPFO), National Pension Scheme and Employees State Insurance...

-TheWire.in Figures highlighted in an RTI reply cut to the heart of a debate over the government’s assertion to count Mudra loan beneficiaries as employed. New Delhi: Struggling to deliver on the poll promise to create one crore Jobs a year, the Narendra Modi government and the BJP may have found a face-saver in the flagship self-employment Mudra scheme, launched under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY) in 2015. However, three years in,...

-Livemint.com China’s example shows the benefits of the rural workforce shifting from the farm to the non-farm sector The government announced its ambitious dream of doubling farmers’ income by 2022-23 in 2015-16. Incomes would have to grow annually by 10.4% to double in seven years. The data on growth rates of farm income given by NITI Aayog in its policy paper on doubling farmers’ income shows that the real income of farmers has...

-The Hindu India must debate solutions to the employment problem, as a true democracy should and would In January this year, the Prime Minister made this statement: “7 million new Jobs created in 2017”. The statement draws on false conclusions of a study by two economists. Here is another: “10-12 million young people join the workforce every year and 7 million new and formal Jobs were created in 2017,” said the Minister of...

-Business Standard/ India Spend Delays in wage payment have been a constant throughout MGNREGS implementation Bachcha Lal’s shirt hung loosely over his frail body, exposing his sunken collarbones, as he stood outside his straw-thatched home in central Uttar Pradesh’s (UP) Bundelkhand region. “They all rely on me,” he said, pointing towards his tubercular son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter. Illiterate and a landless labourer, 65-year-old Lal makes about Rs 175 a day when he...