-The Hindu Rising unemployment must also be seen as a function of rising education and aspirations The report from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) is finally out, garnering a lot of attention based on selective reading of tables and spurring partisan debates. In particular, the staggering increase in the unemployment rate, from 1.7% in 2011-12 to 5.8% in 2017-18 for rural men and from 3.0% to 7.1% for urban men, has...

-Hindustan Times Better health and education facilities, and expansion of old age pension and insurance must follow to improve the socio-economic status of the people . A battle cry of the Congress in the current election is the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (Nyay), which promises Rs 6,000 per month to the poorest 20% of the households. Some have questioned its rationale. Others have questioned its feasibility. Still others have been laudatory about it....

-The Telegraph Shelters that can function as a a school or a vegetable market Kharagpur: Two IIT Kharagpur professors who have designed the shelters that saved thousands of lives after Cyclone Fani hit Odisha last Friday said the lessons of the 1999 supercyclone were the trigger behind their project. Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, professor of civil engineering department at the institute, and Gopal Chandra Mitra, a visiting professor at the department, took one-and-a-half years...

-Newsclick.in It remains to be seen how many political parties pledge to protect the urban poor from eviction and homelessness and work for inclusive ‘Smart Cities’. Over 30 civil society groups consisting of slum dwellers, civil society organisations, women groups, other groups working amongst the urban poor, disabled women groups, street vendors, housing rights activists and so on assembled in Delhi on February 28 to set a new discourse for 2019. This...

-Livemint.com If you want to give a cash benefit, do it without distinguishing between farmers and non-farmers A toothless NITI Aayog is trying to flex its muscles on India’s statistical system. And in doing so, it is destroying its credibility NEW DELHI: The income support scheme announced in the interim budget for small and marginal farmers is both regressive and inefficient, because it neither includes the poorest landless farmers, nor does it...