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...

-NDTV.com Trinamool Congress MP Derek O'Brien said the ministers had dodged the real issues in their press conference. New Delhi: A special press conference by eight Union Ministers was little more than "faff", Trinamool Congress MP Derek O'Brien said on Thursday, countering accusations that the opposition had forced the monsoon session of parliament to end two days prematurely. Brushing away their allegations as bluster, Mr O'Brien pitched eight questions to the ministers ranging...

-The Hindu Industrial output growth halves from 28.6% in May to 13.6% in June Retail inflation cooled slightly to 5.6% in July, slipping below the central bank’s upper tolerance threshold of 6% for the first time in three months, even as industrial output growth halved from 28.6% in May to 13.6% in June, as base effects from the national lockdown of 2020 begin to fade. Food prices at the consumer level played a...

-The Hindu It is time to formulate a wage employment-based national urban livelihood scheme similar to MGNREGS During the pandemic, we have again and again faced the difficult choice of saving lives versus protecting livelihoods. According to the World Economic Outlook report of April, 2021 of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), almost all countries, except China, experienced economic contraction last year. The global GDP shrunk by 3.3%. The contraction in the U.S.,...