-The Hindu Business Line Drop the euphoria for a moment - a third of India is seriously poor. And urban poverty has risen sharply The latest report on the number of poor Indians shows a third of the population living below the recalibrated poverty lines. C Rangarajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, was asked to look into the matter...

-The Hindu Business Line   Perpetual growth is a piece of nonsense. The focus should be on protecting livelihoods through sustainable means Construct a building, demolish it, reconstruct, break it down again, and go on repeating this meaningless exercise. You will have economic growth, as currently measured. But no net gain in employment during the endless cycle of construction and demolition, no net increase in productive capacity, and no appreciable change in poverty...

-The Pioneer Citing security reasons, State Governments have rejected the Centre's proposal to dole out cash to the MGNREGA beneficiaries in the villages having poor network of internet or banks and post offices in the country. Sources in the Union Rural Development Ministry, which is executing the MGNREGA scheme, said that the Central Government had recently asked the States to identify 800-1,000 blocks where rural job workers have not been able...

-The Hindu Business Line   Using Census and other data, the Union Rural Development Ministry is defending itself against complaints that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has led to labour shortage, affecting agriculture. The data available with the Ministry say that during the peak agriculture season, just 2.57 per cent of the total agricultural labourers were involved in MGNREGS activities. The data says that between August and September of...

-The Business Standard   Why Indian unemployment figures puzzle many Census data released on Tuesday contained a shocking piece of information: that 47 million young Indians, under the age of 24, were jobless, and looking for work. That's 20 per cent of the youth population. This is hard data confirming a fact that has long been anecdotal: that India has a jobs crisis. The picture that emerges from the Census data is intriguing:...