-The Hindu Households coped with the loss of income by reducing food intake, selling assets, and borrowing from friends, relatives and money-lenders The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially increased informality in employment, leading to a decline in earnings for the majority of workers, and consequent increase in poverty in the country, according to ‘State of Working India 2021: One Year of Covid-19’, a report brought out annually by Azim Premji University’s Centre for...
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Can Farmland for the Landless Become A Reality On A Large Scale in India -Bharat Dogra
-Countercurrents.org More than half of rural households in India are landless, or almost so. This deprives them of the most obvious asset needed for sustainable livelihoods and food security in villages–farmland. After agriculture the next most important source of rural livelihood in India is dairy farming but here too the household with farmland has free access to crop residues which is increasingly not available to landless households who have to incur extra...
More »A ‘duet’ for India’s urban women -Jean Drèze
-The Hindu Public works could provide valuable support to the urban poor, especially if women get most of the jobs The COVID-19 crisis has drawn attention to the insecurities that haunt the lives of the urban poor. Generally, they are less insecure than the rural poor, partly because fallback work is easier to find in urban areas — if only pulling a rickshaw or selling snacks. Still, the urban poor are exposed...
More »MGNREGA: Today and tomorrow -Sunita Narain
-Down to Earth The programme can provide a safety net for the poor, not just in COVID-19 times, but for times to come In these darkest days of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) — when jobs and economies have collapsed — 56 million households got work in the past three months and these jobs provided relief. This was under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which perhaps is the...
More »Over three-fourth of workers lost livelihoods since lockdown, finds a national survey of informal workers conducted by ActionAid India
-Press release by ActionAid India dated 13th August, 2020 Out of 11,537 respondents, over three-fourths reported that they had lost their livelihood since the imposition of the lockdown. Close to half of the respondents said that they had not received any income, and about 17 per cent had received only partial wages. Approximately 53 per cent said that they had incurred additional debt during the lockdown. More than half of the...
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