Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

The Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen said on child domestic workers that “it is not economic poverty but rather political poverty that is depriving children their rights to education and pushing them to labour force. Our actions should aim at attacking this political poverty to bring education to the reach of children and free child domestic workers from the bondage.” The child domestic labour is common and traditional form of...

KEY TRENDS   • Suicide by self-employed persons in agriculture as a percentage of total suicides at the national level stood at 15.6 percent in 1996, 16.3 percent in 2002, 14.4 percent in 2006, 13.7 percent in 2009, 11.9 percent in 2010, 10.3 percent in 2011, 11.4 percent in 2012 and 8.73 percent in 2013. Suicides committed in the farming sector (by farmers plus agricultural labourers) as a proportion of total suicides in India was 9.4 percent in...

Output and Growth     According to the [inside]Economic Survey 2017-18, Volume-2[/inside] (please click here to access): • The growth rates of agriculture & allied sectors have been fluctuating at 1.5 per cent in 2012-13, 5.6 per cent in 2013-14, (-) 0.2 per cent in 2014-15, 0.7 per cent in 2015-16 and 4.9 per cent in 2016-17. • The Gross Capital Formation (GCF) in Agriculture and Allied Sectors relative to Gross Value Added (GVA) in...

KEY TRENDS    • The proportion of households which completed 100 days of wage employment under MGNREGA in total households that worked was 6.02 percent in 2014-15, 10.07 percent in 2015-16, 7.79 percent in 2016-17 and 5.78 percent in 2017-18 @$ • Completed works as a proportion of total works was 30.15 percent in 2014-15, 29.39 percent in 2015-16, 40.27 percent in 2016-17, 32.01 percent in 2017-18 and 3.3 percent in 2018-19 (as on 7th May, 2018) @$   • In...