-Scroll.in In patriarchal societies, industrialisation and structural transformation are necessary preconditions for the emancipation of women. Around 1900, women in East Asia and South Asia were equally oppressed and unfree. But over the course of the 20th century, gender equality in East Asia advanced far ahead of South Asia. What accounts for this divergence? The first-order difference between East and South Asia is economic development. East Asian women left the countryside in droves...

-Scroll.in Modi government’s flagship Ujjwala scheme continues to hand out new gas connections without fixing the problem of unaffordability. At the start of every monsoon, Doli Kumari’s family refills their LPG cooking gas cylinder and uses it for three or four months. As the rains recede in their village of Tarauna Bhojpur in Bihar’s Araria district, the family switches back to burning wood for daily cooking. This monsoon, however, the family plans not...

-The Indian Express Migration for work represents a match between employers looking for certain skills at low rates and workers who want to earn more than they can back home Political rhetoric and the occasional violence against inter-state migrant workers is nothing new in India. Starting from the Mulki rules in Nizam-ruled Hyderabad in the late 19th century that favoured local employment to the anti-South Indian movements in Bombay in the 1960s...

-Hindustan Times Women are not dropping out. They are being pushed out by the lack of demand for their labour. There has been movement out of agriculture into informal and casual jobs, where the work is sporadic, and often less than 30 days at a stretch. The new modern sector opportunities, especially in high value-added service sectors, mostly accrue to men. Why is women’s employment declining in India? The thrust of the...

-TheWire.in A survey of mazdoor mandis in Surat, Lucknow and Pune shows that even many months after the lockdown ended, workers are struggling to make ends meet. “Since the time of COVID-19 lockdown, there has been a severe crisis of employment opportunities in local labour markets. Getting work for even two days a week is difficult for us. Daily wages too, for any work possible, have dipped by half,” says Rajesh Singh,...