The recently published survey of employment and Unemployment in India, conducted in 300 districts across the country, shows once again that without a reform of India’s archaic labour laws, the share of salaried employed will continue to remain low. The employment-unemployment survey was conducted by the Labour Bureau of the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment. Public attention has largely focused on the unemployment number that the survey threw up....

In a small pastoral vand (hamlet) in Kutch, Gujarat, 10 year old Ramu wakes up at five in the morning. His mother serves him a hasty breakfast of bajra rotis after which he is packed off to the pasturelands surrounding their small hamlet to graze the family's buffaloes. Since his village does not have a working school, grazing the livestock is gainful employment from the point of view of Ramu's...

The effect of labour-oriented schemes like MGNREGS and health insurance cover for 300 million people are yet to be captured, says U.N's labour organisation's report India has performed poorly in providing social security protection to its people until recently with “very high vulnerability” to poverty and informal labour practices in the world, according to the International Labour Organisation. In its first comprehensive ‘World Social Security Report’, which was released yesterday, the ILO...

The mass migration of farmers moving to urban India is becoming a worrisome trend, said planners at a seminar in the Indian Capital. “Many peasants want to leave agriculture, sell land and migrate to cities,” Arvind Mayaram, Additional Secretary and financial advisor to the Ministry of Rural Development told the India Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum on Monday. Seventy per cent of India’s 1.1 billion people currently live in villages,...

Some people feel agriculture in India provides employment much beyond its capacity — that is, the number of people working on the farm is many times the actual requirement. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is among the proponents of this view. In his interaction with a group of editors last month, Singh said, “The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of...