While Asian economies boomed before the global recession in 2008, the fruits of that progress did not translate into better wages or secure employment conditions for workers in the region. The International Labour Organisation (ILO)'s Asian Decent Work Decade launched in 2006 was aimed at five priority areas of competitiveness, productivity and jobs; labour market governance; youth employment, managing labour migration and local development for poverty reduction. Today workers' unions are...

-Live Mint China nearly doubled its rural poverty threshold last week, in a move that will make an estimated 130 million people (or nearly one-tenth of its total population) eligible for various social support schemes funded by the government. China has now tweaked its poverty line for the fourth time in four years. Poverty lines are not set in stone. They have to be regularly changed. This development comes just as the...

-Express News Service   In what could strengthen the case of those seeking lifting of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) from parts of J&K and insurgency-hit North-East, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has said the AFSPA “remains in force in Jammu & Kashmir and the North-Eastern States, conferring an impunity that often leads to the violation of human rights”. This (continuation of AFSPA), a report prepared by the NHRC...

Watching the recent debate on the poverty line has been a depressing experience. As the debate unfolded, we witnessed self-righteous commentators engaged in a game of one-upmanship to prove that no one was more concerned for the poor than they, electronic media failing in its responsibility to inform the public simple facts and the Planning Commission proving itself incapable of communicating in simple terms the rationale behind its proposal either...

The 11th five-year plan promised the nation “inclusive growth”. It marked a departure from the earlier official position that the “benefits of growth” would automatically “trickle down” to the poor, and that if growth was not actually benefiting the poor, then the reason lay in its not being high enough. The 11th plan, by contrast, conceded that the “benefits of growth” did not automatically “trickle down”, but argued that growth...