A recent report by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) enlightens one about the state of farmers' income and indebtedness in 2015-16. Entitled NABARD All India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey 2016-17 – in short NAFIS 2016-17 – the report says that between 2012-13 and 2015-16 the average monthly income for agricultural households grew by around 39 percent. One may recall that the Key Indicators of Situation Assessment Survey...

-ILO News Despite real wage growth, inequality, informality and gender wage gap persist. New Delhi: While India’s economy in the past two decades has seen an annual average GDP rate of 7 % — low pay and inequality persist according to the India Wage Report: Wage policies for decent work and inclusive growth , published by the International Labour Organization. The NSSO estimates also indicate that the real average daily wage has doubled...

-Outlook The collection of separate figures for suicides of farmers and farm labour has started in 2014, the year in which there were 5650 farmers committed suicides as against 6710 cases of farm labour suicides. According to the latest figures released by the government, farmer suicides in 2016 have come down to 6351 from 8007 in 2015, a drop of 21 per cent.  Suicides among agricultural labourers, however, have gone up by...

-The Hindu Besides the missing informal sector, over-estimation of output growth also offers clues Are the latest employment estimates by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) factually correct? No. They are off the mark, and confined to the economy’s organised or formal sector, accounting at best for 15% of the workforce. Is there a paradox in high output growth rates and the marginal effect on employment? Probably not, if one acknowledges that GDP...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...