-Hindustan Times Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot on Friday launched the ‘Indira Gandhi Urban Employment Scheme’ to provide 100 days of employment in a year to families residing in urban areas. Launching the programme at a state-level event in Ambedkar Bhawan, Gehlot termed it a “historic initiative”. He added that the new scheme was mirrored along the lines of MGNREGA, which was started during the UPA government’s tenure for employment in rural areas...

-Down to Earth 29% increase in suicides by farm labourers from 2019  The National Crime Record Bureau has released an alarming statistic. An agricultural labourer died by suicide every two hours and a total 1,64,033 people died of suicide in India in 2021. The number amounts to 5,563 suicides by farm labourers, which is a 9 per cent increase from 2020 and a 29 per cent increase from 2019. The highest numbers were recorded...

-Financial Express Pan-India unemployment down since the second wave of Covid-19. Even as there has been a steady decline in urban unemployment since the highly infective second Covid wave, joblessness in seven states of Rajasthan, Bihar, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh, besides Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, remained at very high levels, as per the periodic labour force survey (PLFS) data. These states, where unemployment has consistently been higher than...

Door-to-door and village-to-village surveys carried out by researchers of the Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana detected a total of 9,291 suicides that were committed by farmers in six districts of Punjab during the period from 2000 to 2018. Situated in the Malwa region of Punjab, which is known for cotton farming and the prevalence of cancer among its population, Sangrur (2,506) witnessed the highest number of...

-IndiaSpend.com The United Nations projects that India's total population will surpass China's much sooner than expected, but even so, data show that India's population is actually declining, says Poonam Muttreja of the Population Foundation of India Mumbai: "What could women do if they wanted fewer children? They were opting for, amongst other things, abortion," says Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. "Abortion rates as a proxy for contraception...