-Newsclick.in “Our population today is around 136 crore. Where will you get food grains for them through zero budget farming? This is sheer madness.” There is an inherent seductive charm to the term zero budget natural farming, for it makes the arduous occupation of agriculture appear beguilingly simple, an economic proposition without any risk or even requirement of capital. Coined by the Vidarbha-based farmer, Subhash Palekar, who was bestowed with the Padma...
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Not smart cities, India needs climate-smart cities to protect its urban poor from heat waves -Sahana Ghosh & Mayank Aggarwal
-Scroll.in Even at night, people living in densely-built, low-income urban neighbourhoods get no respite. As India stares at one of the longest heatwaves in three decades – which so far has claimed over 200 lives – experts warn that the scorcher will impact people in poor urban neighbourhoods for weeks after even after it is over. In a study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment in April, researchers mapped and...
More »Squandering the gender dividend -Sonalde Desai
-The Hindu It is a national tragedy that women unable to find work are dropping out of the labour force If labour force survey data are to be believed, rural India is in the midst of a gender revolution in which nearly half the women who were in the workforce in 2004-5 had dropped out in 2017-18. The 61st round of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) recorded 48.5% rural women above...
More »Pronab Sen, former chief statistician of India, interviewed by Kabir Agarwal and Anuj Srivas (TheWire.in)
-TheWire.in "I think the fact that the whole [NSSO] exercise began with a fundamental premise of keeping it comparable, that has been forgotten." The fierce debate over India’s unemployment figures came to a head last week, when a jobs data report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) was finally made public. This report has been a source of contention ever since two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigned allegedly...
More »The sum and substance of the jobs data -Sonalde Desai
-The Hindu Rising unemployment must also be seen as a function of rising education and aspirations The report from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) is finally out, garnering a lot of attention based on selective reading of tables and spurring partisan debates. In particular, the staggering increase in the unemployment rate, from 1.7% in 2011-12 to 5.8% in 2017-18 for rural men and from 3.0% to 7.1% for urban men, has...
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