A meticulous study of the agrarian relations in three villages. ONE of our senior sociologists once drew my attention to the distinction between economics and other social sciences. Other social sciences – sociology and anthropology, for instance – he said, pay a great deal of attention to gathering primary data and interpreting them, whereas economics relies on secondary data for its analysis. This is, to a large extent, a fair...

Block vehicular and railway traffic across Punjab, demand relaxation of paddy procurement norms Various factions of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) and organisations of landless Labourers blocked the railway traffic at Moga and ten other locations in Punjab on Friday. They also halted the vehicular traffic on many highways, demanding relaxation in the procurement norms of paddy. The protesters claimed that adverse weather conditions had affected the quality of grains, and said...

“Inside the mine everything is very fragile. Even the falling of a small rock can cause death sometimes. People from outside cannot imagine what the hell is inside the mine!” These are the words of 16-year old Muzzammal Haque who works in a coal mine in the Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya. He is yet another example of the bonded child labour in the various coal mines in the Jaintia Hills on...

Economists’ report says tractors are used for just 178 hrs a year and electric motors are overused That Punjab faces an acute labour shortage each paddy season is a known and established fact. But not many know that 48.66 per cent of the total ‘family labour’ — members of a farmer’s family — available for agriculture remains underutilised in the state. A study of the resources employed in Punjab agriculture throws up...

In reply to an RTI query filed by the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) in August, the labour department of Delhi government has said that it does not have consolidated figures on the labour deaths reported during the Commonwealth Games  preparations. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) had separately filed an affidavit in the high court in September which said that 109 workers had died on its sites during...