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...

-CBGA Blog India presented its latest Union Budget (for FY 2022 -23) in early February amid much hope, as the country is still reeling from the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic, which has lasted for two years. To deal with the pandemic induced socio-economic crisis, countries across the world  have been announcing policy measures outside of their annual budgets. The Indian government, too, made many such announcements, but given the scale of the...

-TheWire.in/ National Herald Jawid Laiq, who has accurately predicted poll outcomes since 1977 based on his conversations with boatmen at the Sangam in Prayagraj (Allahabad), this time asked UP transport drivers to pick winners One of Uttar Pradesh’s busiest bus terminals is at Noida’s Sector 35, where every few minutes a state transport bus either arrives, leaves or stops to fill up on CNG. Surendra Singh (45), driver of an Uttar Pradesh state...

-Down to Earth Post mechanisation, for the first time there is innovation in farm equipment to revive bullocks and aid small farmers Simhachalam calls himself a ‘bullock entrepreneur’. Each agricultural season, this farmer from Andhra Pradesh’s Sangra village travels with his pair of bullocks to work on other people’s farms in nearby villages for a fee. Like most other parts of the country, bullocks in these tribal villages are traditionally used only for...

-Leaflet.in/ Newsclick.in In light of the recent PIL filed before the Supreme Court demanding social security for gig/platform workers, it is critical to pay attention to how the recent labor codes, which are paraded as being progressive, are a mere lip service to social security, including for gig/platform workers, writes Namrata. In September last year, the Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers [IFAT], a workers’ organisation consisting largely of gig transport...