-Hindustan Times Workers who have registered so far belong to diverse occupations, such as construction, apparel manufacturing, fishing, gig and platform work, street vending as well as domestic work. Nearly half of 40 million workers of the country’s informal economy registered on a recently launched national portal are women, and most workers regardless of gender are from disadvantaged castes, official data that shines new light on India’s invisible unorganised labour force shows. Trends...

-The Hindu The nuances of the unorganised workers’ identity are complex which portal registration may not be able to capture On August 26, 2021, the Ministry of Labour and Employment (MOLE) launched the E-Shram, the web portal for creating a National Database of Unorganized Workers (NDUW), which will be seeded with Aadhaar. It seeks to register an estimated 398-400 million unorganised workers and to issue an E-Shram card. However, it has come...

-The Hindu The Government’s consistent ‘no data’ declarations on important issues are a critical part of a larger political project It can be safely assumed that the popular American dictum, “In God we trust; all others must bring data”, is unlikely to be found in any office of the Narendra Modi government. There is mounting evidence to show that either the Government has ‘no data’ about issues that show it in a...

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...

-The Hindu It could be a long wait before employers and workers enjoy the so-called benefits extended by the labour codes The National Democratic Alliance government enacted the Code on Wages in August 2019 and the other three Codes, viz., the Industrial Relations Code, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code and Code on Social Security (CSS) in September 2020. Later, it had framed the draft rules albeit incompletely under all...