-Hindustan Times A corrosive culture distances the State from the public and legitimises demands for public ‘discipline’ to achieve policy Goals Caught on a now viral video, ordering police to “break the heads” of farmer protesters, Haryana bureaucrat Ayush Sinha achieved notoriety last week. The incident, coupled with the Haryana chief minister (CM)’s condemnation of the “choice of words” while insisting on “strictness” to maintain law and order, speaks volumes for how...

-The Hindu State govt. has an ambitious target of transforming fallow lands into productive lands Several challenges lie in the task of realising the DMK government’s Goals of transforming 11.75 lakh hectares of fallow lands into productive lands and doubling the double-cropped area, in 10 years, say veteran agricultural experts and farmers. Please click here to read more.  ...

-Down to Earth 27% of coastline expanded between 1990 and 2018, according to a report by Union Ministry of Earth Sciences As much as 32 per cent of India’s coastline underwent sea erosion and 27 per cent of it expanded between 1990 and 2018, according to a recent technical report by the National Centre for Coastal Research (NCCR) under the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences. The West Bengal coastline has been particularly vulnerable:...

-TheWire.in The ‘vikas’ train has begun to chug the wrong way, as it were. A worrisome aspect of the Indian economy is reflected in the share of employment in agriculture dramatically rising from 42.5% of the total employed in 2018-19 to 45.6% in 2019-20. This may signify an unusually large movement of labour from industry or services sectors to agriculture. The total number of persons employed in India varies between 400 million and...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...