-The Hindu The focus on One Nation One Ration Card is misplaced when what is needed is a universal Public Distribution System With the economic crisis continuing on the one hand and the health system crumbling under the burden of rising COVID-19 cases on the other, it is clear that it will take a long time for things to get back to “normal”. Unemployment is high and it will take a while...
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Jean Drèze, development economist and social activist, interviewed by Shreehari Paliath (IndiaSpend.com)
-IndiaSpend.com Bengaluru: Global economic output is expected to contract by 4.9% in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 lockdown. India announced a lockdown on March 24, 2020, which was extended over two months, and continues in pockets of states depending on the spread of the disease, which has now infected more than half a million people in the country. The lockdown impacted millions of inter-state migrant workers who form the bulwark of India’s...
More »Two joblessness narratives in India from two large-scale surveys -Sriharsha Devulapalli and Pramit Bhattacharya
-Livemint.com A Mint analysis suggests that the CMIE figures should not be considered a proxy for the official unemployment and labour force participation rates As the country went under lockdown, and everything, including the collection of statistics, came to a halt, analysts and economists were left scrambling for data to seize up just how badly the economy was doing. One dataset that has come to the rescue is the nationally representative employment-unemployment...
More »It’s raining jobs in rural India as farm economy opens up -Prashant K. Nanda
-Livemint.com * Increased government spending on the rural jobs programme has also aided returnee migrants * The urban job loss rate fell nearly 2 percentage points to 11.19% in the week ended 21 June over the previous week The timely arrival of the monsoon has given a much-needed boost to rural employment, absorbing thousands of migrant workers who have returned to their rural homes in seasonal farm jobs. The rural unemployment rate continued to...
More »Lockdown further impoverishes those who were living on the edges of existence even during normal times, finds a new report
A recent survey that was conducted through telephonic interviews among 1,405 respondents across the states of Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan and Jharkhand reveals the precarious conditions of workers nearly 45 days after the announcement of COVID-19 lockdown. The report entitled Labouring Lives: Hunger, Precarity and Despair amid Lockdown tries to understand the extent (and depth) of job loss and hunger 45 days after the lockdown. Hunger and...
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