-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre is likely to work out the contours of the reworked land acquisition bill by next week amid indications that it may be purged of all the politically unpopular provisions. It is learnt that the Modi government may allow states to draft their own acquisition laws with the frame of reference being the central law which would only have "pro-people" measures; a tack aimed at...

-Business Standard Factories with up to 300 workers can fire without government approval After failing to get the Centre’s approval to the ordinance route, the Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Wednesday passed a single Bill to amend eight major labour laws; seven other laws would be changed through compounding provisions, etc. With this, Madhya Pradesh became the third state in a year, after Rajasthan and Gujarat, to pass its own labour law amendments...

-The Indian Express Socio-Economic and Caste Census can help identify welfare beneficiaries without falling into a binary trap. The release earlier this month of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) has been followed by much media analysis. Some have expressed scepticism about what it shows and others have treated it as yet another set of numbers on how many are poor in India. It has also been variously hailed as revolutionising benefit...

-The Hindu Chhattisgarh records the fourth highest in the country. With 2,568 farmers’ suicides during 2014, Maharashtra recorded the highest number in the country, though activists pointed out that the number was far higher. The data released on Friday by the National Crime Records Bureau also show that Chhattisgarh is among the top four States in farmers’ suicides. According to the NCRB, Maharashtra recorded 578 fewer suicides than 2013, when 3,146 farmers ended their...

-The Indian Express Estimates based on SECC and NSS data have different purposes. Recently, the government released data from the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011. There has been comment that hereafter, we need not have consumption-based poverty estimates using NSS (National Sample Surveys) data. It is thought that SECC data will alone be enough to estimate poverty and deprivation. Here, we briefly examine the differences between the two and clarify that...