-TheWire.in The Narela industrial complex is one of the biggest in Asia, packed with booming small-scale industrial units. It runs entirely on the labour of low-income workers who have very little say on their pay and living conditions. In order to start liberalising trade and industrial production capacity through economic policy, the Indian nation-state began implementing a set of Washington Consensus style neo-liberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. The liberalisation push across...

-Newsclick.in Inequality is not natural but manufactured. It’s time policymakers stopped normalising the wealth and income gap. Else, post-Covid inequality could become a permanent feature. Wealth and income inequality are more than just economic concepts. They also influence education and health outcomes, poverty levels, employment and unemployment rates, opportunities, choices, and, ultimately, happiness. Of late, several reports have investigated the impact of COVID-19 on various segments of society at the regional, national,...

-The Telegraph ‘Hundreds of workers have left for other states and more are following them these days' Siliguri: The trend of out-migration from Bengal — often linked to the lack of Employment opportunities in the state — is back in different districts after the Covid-19-induced gap of two years. Senior government officials and elected representatives at rural bodies in a number of districts admitted that they were witnessing the exodus of workers, who...

-The Hindu Business Line Why access to capital for MSME entrepreneurs has the potential to alter India’s social fabric India’s social fabric has undergone a series of transformations since Independence. After the liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s, the market opened up and Employment opportunities grew, as did the spending power and standard of living of the average Indian. As financial access grew, so did social mobility. However, certain sections have lagged...

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...