-Newsclick.in Construction, manufacturing, hospitality sectors most affected. Over 1.7 crore daily wage workers lose jobs. Over 2.5 crore existing jobs have been lost between January and May 2021. The bulk of these losses – about 2.2 crore – have occurred in April and May, the period in which India was engulfed in a brutal second wave of COVID-19, leading to state-level lockdowns of varying degrees. These chilling figures emerge from the latest...

-IndiaSpend.com Migrant workers in different states have been struggling to find work, wages and rations, say activists and researchers. The Public Distribution System must be universalised, they say, and free rations must be provided for at least six more months. Bengaluru: Sudhir Paswan, 29, is back to square one--in his village in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district, counting his losses. It has been more than a week since he returned, after failing to secure...

-ThePrint.in The unemployment rate for women shot up to 17%, more than double the rate for men, data from private research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy revealed. New Delhi: Women in India suffered disproportionately because of the coronavirus outbreak last year and they are once again at the receiving end of the pandemic’s second wave, adding to the risks of economic recovery. From lower wages to job losses and slower pace of...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-The Indian Express While the government has failed to deliver what was promised through the main budget and subsequent mini-budgets, estimates for next year also point to missed opportunities to use fiscal measures to revive the ailing economy. Expectations from Budget 2021 were high. Unsurprisingly so, for an economy battered by two years of slowdown, with a pre-pandemic annual growth rate of 4 per cent being a decadal low and the subsequent...