-The Economic Times Over the last decade the UPA government has tried to reduce poverty by legislating a regime of rights accompanied by the national rural employment guarantee (NREG) programme -spending Rs 1,70,000 crore on this strategy. This strategy would have been fine if the transformation of India from a strong currency, high growth and low inflation economy to aweak currency, low growth and high inflation economy had been accompanied by a...
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Over 2,000 fewer farmers every day-P Sainath
-The Hindu The mistaken notion that the 53 per cent of India's population ‘dependent on agriculture' are all ‘farmers' leads many to dismiss the massive farmers' suicides as trivial There are nearly 15 million farmers (‘Main' cultivators) fewer than there were in 1991. Over 7.7 million less since 2001, as the latest Census data show. On average, that's about 2,035 farmers losing ‘Main Cultivator' status every single day for the last 20...
More »The Political Economy of Shadow Finance in West Bengal-Subhanil Chowdhury
-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...
More »'Jobless growth' during UPA-1, admits Centre -Rajeev Deshpande
-The Times of India Some 20 months after hotly contesting data on UPA-1's "jobless growth", the government has admitted to lack of substantial increase in employment between 2004-05 and 2009-2010, with the self-employed workforce shrinking from 56.4% to 50.7% of the total workforce. In absolute numbers, the self-employed decreased from 258.4 million to 232.7 million in this period while regular salaried workers rose from 69.7 million to 75.1 million. The ranks of...
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KEY TRENDS • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8 • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...
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