-The Hindu For millions hit by agricultural distress, the escape to construction jobs is grinding to a halt With the Union Budget to be presented on February 1, it is hoped that the Finance Minister will make a significantly higher allocation for investment in infrastructure. It is vital for addressing rural distress. The Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) informed us that ‘landlessness and dependence on manual casual labour for a livelihood...

-Livemint.com Immediate challenges to economy top talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi, senior ministers and economists, sector experts from across India New Delhi: The government on Wednesday signalled that the Union budget for 2018-19 would include solutions for vexed problems such as rural distress, weak employment and revival of private investments. These immediate challenges to the economy topped the extensive discussion that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior cabinet colleagues had on Wednesday...

-Livemint.com There cannot be a solution to the problem of low wage growth in rural India unless opportunities for getting decent and productive jobs are available outside agriculture One of the anomalies that stood out from the broad narrative of rural distress was the stubborn fact that rural wages were growing, not just in nominal but also in real, or inflation-adjusted terms. And if real rural wages were seeing higher growth, surely...

-Newsclick.in   PM Modi - who promised to create 1 crore jobs - is supremely indifferent to this crushing crisis.   In Jind district of Haryana, 8 posts of peon and one post of process server were advertised. Authorities were inundated with 14,836 applications for the former and 3662 for the latter. That’s about 2055 applicants per vacancy. Although the peon’s position required just class 10 eligibility, graduates, post graduates and even PhD...

-Livemint.com If we do not recognize the problem on hand, we will not have any reason to try and find solutions India’s jobless growth is a myth, stated R. Gopalan and M.C. Singhi in an opinion piece in Mint on 19 December. They used data published by the Labour Bureau from their employment-unemployment surveys between 2009-10 and 2015-16. These were the first and last surveys conducted by the Labour Bureau on the...