-The Hindu Business Line Labour Ministry has decided to change the base year of the Consumer Price Index for agriculture and rural workers Union Labour Ministry has decided to revise the wage calculation for India’s workforce. The Ministry, in its latest computations, has decided to change the base year of the Consumer Price Index for Agriculture Labourers and Rural Workers (CPI-AL&RW) to 2019. At present, the base year is 1986-87. According to a...

-TheNewsMinute.com Caught between denialism and short-sightedness, vulnerable communities in Sivakasi bear the brunt of clampdowns due to air pollution. At the strike of a gavel in Delhi, lights go out in Sivakasi. When states located thousands of kilometres away place curbs, sales turn out to be a damp squib in the fireworks capital. Year after year, about 6.5 lakh people in Sivakasi dependent on the fireworks industry suffer from rude market shocks because...

-Newsclick.in The Biden administration is realising this. The need of the hour, therefore, is to build a post-pandemic growth strategy centred on an increase in public investment and public spending. The period of neo-liberalism witnesses an increase in the share of economic surplus in total output both in individual countries and also for the world as a whole. This is because the “opening” up of the economy to freer trade in goods...

-Countercurrents.org Real life has a way of surprising theory. One of the most intensely discussed theoretical questions on the Left has been how to bring agricultural labourers and peasants, including well-to-do peasants, together in a common struggle against landlord domination in India’s countryside. Numerous Marxist gatherings have for years discussed the contradiction between peasants and labourers holding up a decisive resolution of the contradiction between the landlords and the rest of...

The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...