It is getting harder for jobseekers to return to gainful employment and for new entrants to find adequate jobs, says the ILO. THERE is little in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) annual projection of job growth to cheer about. The year 2012 has been described as a year of stark reality. A third of the global workforce is currently unemployed or poor; that is, 200 million members of the 3.3-billion-strong global...

Unlike the dearness allowance that accrues to the salaries of workers every six months without any hassle, the linking of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) wages to inflation or the Consumer Price Index for agricultural wages has not led to a smooth annual revision. The revision for NREGA wages is supposed to happen every January after it was introduced last January. However, even a month into the new year, the...

-The Times of India   The states would milk the Centre by arbitrarily hiking their 'minimum wages' if workers in the job guarantee scheme were to be paid by the "minimum wages Act", the Centre cautioned while appealing against a court order quashing power to fix remuneration under MGNREGA. Union rural development ministry has sought revision of the Karnataka high court order giving in to the finance ministry's pressure despite the fear...

The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...