-The Hindu For jobs to grow, consumer demand has to improve consistently. This can only happen with an industrial policy, which India has not had since 1991 There will be no demographic dividend without growth in industrial and service sector jobs. The underlying logic behind a dividend is that as jobs grow, incomes rise and so do savings. Based on higher savings, the investment rate to GDP grows, resulting in faster GDP...

It seems that not only civil society activists, but even the poor and marginalized themselves are not happy with the Centre’s social welfare policies. Following the recent protest by 150 eminent persons regarding failure of the NDA Government to take-up urgent measures for employment generation and ensuring food, nutrition & drinking water security in the backdrop of severe drought in roughly 1/3rd of Indian districts (please click here to access),...

-The Hindu Surveys conducted by activists estimate that there are over 1.2 million manual scavengers in India As numbers become data and move from being just a random rearrangement of 0-9, they speak volumes about peoples, nations, and their objectives. They form the basis of government policies, and have the intrinsic potential to change lives, correct historical wrongs and national trajectories. The last election results, we were told, were a message from ‘Aspirational...

-The Indian Express Of the Rs 21,000 crore expected to be released till June, this month the ministry has provided Rs 12,000 crore to the states towards payment of last year’s arrears for labour cost as well as for the month of April. Anticipating a huge spike in the demand for work due to severe drought conditions in most parts of the country, the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) has decided...

-Business Standard 2,170 million person-days planned for FY17, compared with 2,391 million person-days last year At a time when nearly half of India's 676 districts are grappling with a second consecutive year of drought, the government expects a decline in the demand for work under the flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in 2016-17. The estimated number of days when people in rural India will be offered work under MGNREGS...