A document of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) dated 25th June, 2018 says that the number of members subscribing to the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) scheme gives one an idea of the level of employment in the formal sector viz. mostly employment in establishments employing 20 or more persons (though EPF is applicable for certain organisations, which employ less than 20 persons, subject to certain conditions and...

-Livemint.com The home likes the income, but is unwilling to let the woman give up on household work, child care and eldercare duties A long time ago when I was in my first job as a trainee researcher in a magazine, I would take the chartered bus (a working people’s school bus that collects people from a residential area and drops them in an office hub) from home to office. The art...

-The Hindu In a pre-election Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley serves up a mix of populism and prudence With a clear eye on the Lok Sabha election, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley pulled out all the stops in the Narendra Modi government’s last full Budget to promise a better deal for farmers, boost the rural economy and make the poor less vulnerable to health exigencies. Responding to the distress in the agriculture sector...

-The Hindu It is crucial to align policy across sectors and upgrade the country’s social infrastructure In India’s highly segmented labour market, one can still discern at least three demographic groups that are in urgent need of jobs: a growing number of better educated youth; uneducated agricultural workers who wish to leave agricultural distress behind; and young women, who too are better educated than ever before. India is indeed the fastest growing large economy...

-The Hindu Sans quality jobs, ‘aspirational young India’ will become ‘angry young India’ The government – and Paytm – may not agree, but there are some downsides to the rising digitisation and connectivity. One is an unleashing of aspirations. Everyone wants not just what Bengal’s leftists used to contemptuously dismiss as components of the middle-class Indian dream — gaadi, baadi, chaakri (car, home, job) — but a whole lot of other things....