Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-Newsclick.in The migrant labourers face absolute hardship and exploitation while working outside their native states and face economic turmoil after returning home, forcing them to leave again. Kolkata/ Baharampore: Samrat Karyi (18) of Madhupur gram panchayat of Coochbihar had gone to Rajasthan to work as a migrant labourer in the construction sector. He boarded the Bikaner Guwahati express to return home with his brother. When he was nearing the Coochbihar Junction, he...

-TheQuint.com Ashok Saket, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste, was admitted to Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, and remains critical. In a shocking incident from Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa district, a labourer’s hand was cut off by his employer when he demanded his wages, on Sunday, 21 November. The victim, Ashok Saket, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste, was admitted to Sanjay Gandhi Hospital in a critical condition. The victim’s nephew Lavkush Saket said that the incident...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...