-Financial Express Dataset and methodological weaknesses cast doubt on recent poverty estimates that claim drastic reduction Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani in a working paper (IMF), claimed India’s poverty, per a $1.9 per person per day poverty line (at PPP), was 0.9% of the population in 2020. Thanks to government transfer of free rations of 5 kg per person month, it fell to 0.8% (from 0.9% in 2019). Roy and de Velt, for...
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New EPFO accounts no proxy for new jobs -Santosh Mehrotra and Kingshuk Sarkar
-FinancialExpress.com Recent registrations cited as proof of job creation were mostly formalisation of existing jobs Defending the Centre’s record on employment, prime minister Narendra Modi, in a speech in Rajya Sabha, talked about the impressive net enrolment to Employment Provident Fund Organization (EPFO): during 2021, 1.20 crore beneficiaries were enrolled under EPF—about 65 lakh beneficiaries in the 18-25 age bracket, implying they are first-time entrants to the labour market. He connected the...
More »Claims vs reality: India's bleak job picture -Santosh Mehrotra and Tuhinsubhra Giri
-Deccan Herald Poor pandemic management has added 10 million youth to the ranks of the unemployed in the country India’s GDP growth rate has been slowing consistently since 2016, thanks to consistent economic policy mistakes made by the Union government, starting with demonetisation. It hurt the non-farm unorganised sector MSMEs, as it hurt agriculture (third year running, after two years of drought in 2014 and 2015). Between them, these sectors are responsible for...
More »Dropping the ball on growth and jobs -Santosh Mehrotra
-Financial Express The state desperately needs a strategy for labour-intensive manufacturing; the attacks on cattle-trade have knocked down its once-thriving leather industry In 1955, the share of population below the poverty line (NSS 1955) in Uttar Pradesh was 64%, not too different from that in the Madras State (present-day Tamil Nadu), at 73.6%, or in West Bengal, at 53.6%. Four decades later, in 1993-94, while India’s poverty rate was 45.3%, UP’s was...
More »The Curious Case of India's Millions of ‘Missing’ Poor People -KD Maiti and Santosh Mehrotra
-TheWire.in There is a need to set right the ‘national multidimensional poverty index’ framework to capture the true story of deprivation. The global sustainable development agenda demands that countries measure the population living in poverty and reduce it by at least half by 2030. So, in order to monitor progress on this critical development indicator, UNDP and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) compute what is called the ‘Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)’...
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