-Hindustan Times Plight of the migrants: Jobless labourers return home after demonetisation Twenty-three-year-old Avinash Kumar is planning to postpone his sister’s marriage. The money he had saved, working at a sweatshop in New Delhi’s Mongolpuri, is all but gone. Kumar lost his job in about two weeks from the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, in a move that he termed as the biggest-ever...

-The Hindu A more progressive Central law on land acquisition is now in place, but several States have already either amended the new law or enacted legislation of their own. On August 31, the Supreme Court in Kedar Nath Yadav v. State of West Bengal delivered one of the most momentous decisions of the year. It invalidated the expropriation of land in Singur by the erstwhile Left Front government in Bengal, and...

A shortage of labour is affecting cutting and polishing jobs in Surat's diamond industry. Skyrocketing prices of raw diamonds is a key factor leading to thousands of workers moving away from the diamond industry to other businesses . "The labour that came into the cutting and polishing jobs of the Surat diamond industry 20-25 years ago, that generation is moving towards retirement. And the new generation that should come in this industry doesn't...

That the economies of Asia, in particular China, India and Australia, are responsible for whatever growth is currently taking place on the planet is now acknowledged and underlined by the West as well as by multilateral financial agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The 3.5 per cent growth in the American economy in the July-September quarter has enthused many into believing that the worst of...

KEY TRENDS  • The new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million @* • The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the...