-The Hindu A lack of sufficient funds, rampant payment delays and abysmal wage rates are to blame The ?11,000 crore fraud that diamond merchant Nirav Modi is said to have created is a figure that needs to be put in perspective. The total amount of wages pending under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme for the whole country (2016-17) was around ?11,000 crore too. This sum is a...
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Job growth or number jugglery -Arun Kumar
-The Indian Express The problem is under-employment. It won’t be resolved if the residually-employed are notionally shifted from the informal to formal sector. In an article in January, Soumya Kanti Ghosh and Pulak Ghosh (Ghosh and Ghosh) claimed that seven million new jobs have been created in the formal sector. Their claim is based on the increase in registration under the Employees Provident Fund (EPFO), National Pension Scheme and Employees State Insurance...
More »Icrier Study: Agri research & education funding heavily skewed
-Financial Express Among the six states studied by Icrier, Gujarat spends the most on agriculture R&E (0.59%), followed by Bihar (0.50%), Punjab (0.41%), Odisha (0.25%), Uttar Pradesh (0.17%) and Madhya Pradesh (0.24%). The government’s expenditure on agricultural research and extension education services is not only very low but also heavily skewed in favour of crops, even as the dairy sector has a rapidly increasing share in the gross value of output...
More »PM2.5 levels rising in proportion to stubble burning, finds Nasa Study -Jayashree Nandi
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A new Study by Nasa scientists has concluded that there is a strong link between agricultural fires in Punjab and Haryana and PM2.5 levels in Delhi during the post-monsoon months of October and November. PM2.5 concentrations in Delhi, which is downwind to Punjab and Haryana, show a coherent increase — rising often from as low as 50 micrograms per cubic metres (µg/ m3) before the...
More »Southern comfort: India's global poverty rank improves -Suvojit Bagchi
-The Hindu Study says poverty levels fell from 55% to 21% in a decade, mainly due to the lowered burden in the southern States Kolkata: India’s Multidimensional Poverty (MDP) has dropped significantly, largely as a result of the performance of five key southern States. Between 2005-06 to 2015-16, poverty level came down from 55% to 21%, improving the country’s MDP ranking. Following the drop in poverty levels, India moved to the 26th...
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