-TheWire.in Improved data collection and reporting, appropriate protective gear and better government policies can all help address the problems of sanitation workers. Over the last seven or eight years in India, sanitation has been a key focus of government programmes. Several thousand crores have been spent on the issue and there has been remarkable progress in terms of toilets constructed. The sanitation problem has also received ample attention in the development sector,...

-The Hindu 52 days after it was announced as a top relief package, Finance Minister says it ‘is in the process’. A Rs.60,000-crore loan guarantee scheme for helping sectors hit the hardest by COVID-19 is yet to get off the ground, 52 days after it figured at the top of an economic relief package to cope with the second wave’s shocks. This proposed credit support was part of a new ₹1.1 lakh crore...

-TheWire.in The ‘vikas’ train has begun to chug the wrong way, as it were. A worrisome aspect of the Indian economy is reflected in the share of employment in agriculture dramatically rising from 42.5% of the total employed in 2018-19 to 45.6% in 2019-20. This may signify an unusually large movement of labour from industry or services sectors to agriculture. The total number of persons employed in India varies between 400 million and...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-The Telegraph Inequality remains integral to India’s growth story This year marks three decades of market-friendly economic reforms introduced in 1991 by the P.V. Narasimha Rao administration. Manmohan Singh was considered the mastermind behind breaking the shackles of the license-permit raj, an inefficient government, a stifled private sector, and a strictly controlled import regime. All these led to low economic growth, large incidence of poverty, an inefficient, unwieldy public sector, and pervasive...