-Leaflet.in Informal migrant workers in metropolitan cities of India have faced multiple forms of vulnerabilities in the last two years of the pandemic. Linkages across schemes for such workers are absolutely critical to creating a social security net that protects them from falling into similar cycles of poverty and destitution during macro and micro economic distresses. ON the occasion of International Labour Day, or ‘May Day’, we explore the dimensions of vulnerabilities...

-The New Indian Express First, existing studies have analysed the intensity of farmer suicides in isolation, i.e. without comparing farmer suicides with those by other professionals. Farmer suicides have always been a highly debated issue in the public discourse on agriculture sector performance in India. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, 3,58,164 people engaged in the farming profession have committed suicide in India from 1995 to 2019. Though these numbers...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

The increase in the total number of suicides committed in India during 2020 in comparison to the previous years has hit the headlines recently. While some media commentators have stated that the economic distress (caused by job loss, income loss, failure of business, and growing hunger, among other things) in 2020 could have led to more suicides being committed, others have said that home isolation and deteriorating mental health (associated...

-The Hindu However, suicides among landowning farmers dropped slightly during pandemic year The number of agricultural labourers who died by suicide in 2020 was 18% higher than the previous year, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report released on Thursday. However, suicides among landowning farmers dropped slightly during the pandemic year. The farm sector was one of the few bright spots in the Indian economy last year, recording growth on the...