-Livemint.com Quality employment eludes majority of India’s university educated Last year, 2.3 million people, including postgraduates and PhDs, applied for 368 peon posts advertised in Uttar Pradesh. Outrage followed. Why were highly educated people applying for a job which required only primary school education and knowing how to ride a bicycle, people asked. To answer, one needs to find out the jobs people who have been through a university end up in. According...

-Business Standard Looking at economics behind agricultural households, a survey notes that 68.3% of such households still relied on agriculture as primary source of income Rural distress is a known story but a survey by NSSO has revealed the alarming level of fragmentation in farmland and unavailability of jobs. As many as 69 per cent agricultural households own less than a hectare of farmland each, making farming unviable and forcing migration to...

-Livemint.com Data on incomes and wealth suggest India is far more unequal than official estimates based on Consumption Expenditure data suggest Inequality is in the news once again and the news is not particularly good. In a speech last month, Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan commented that increasing inequality could be curtailing world demand. Since the rich typically spend a smaller portion of their income compared with the poor—who spend...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The current spike in pulse prices could have been anticipated, but India's cereal-centric food security policies emphasize rice and wheat while dis-incentivizing the production of pulses despite clear trends that show a declining preference for cereals. Even though India's dependency on imported pulses grew as imports rose from 2.7 million tonnes in 2010-11 to over four million tonnes this year, minimum support price-driven procurement and the...

-Business Standard Says the actual poverty is much higher than suggested by the multilateral lender, adding there is lack of scientific basis in computing the poverty line The government has contested the World Bank's recently released data that showed only 12.4 per cent of India's population was poor in 2011-12, considering an expenditure cut-off of $1.9 a person a day on purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. It said the actual poverty was...