-The Week Shambhu Kumar, 8, quite liked his job as a domestic help in a small town in Assam. He had to mind two children nearly his age, keep an eye on the ducks and be available for chores all day. It wasn't too hard, and he was well fed, too, though he missed his grandmother, a tea garden labourer. One day, some women from the state education department came to the...

-Economic and Political Weekly The provisional results of the Sixth Economic Census (2013) of establishments in the non-agricultural sector suggest that this is not a census count. A comparison with the National Sample Survey numbers shows that the number of workers in the latest census may be only a little over half the actual number. There also appear to be some serious omissions in individual states. R Krishnaswamy and S L Shetty...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The national capital territory of Delhi accounts for 1.53% of establishments and 2.34% of the total employment in the country. Of the total people employed by establishments in the city, 26,20,993 were male while 3,63,857 were females. With women forming only 12.19% of the city's workforce, Delhi is way behind the national average of 25.56%. For every woman employed in an establishment, there are seven...

-The Hindu   The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...

-Frontline Two draft Bills on the Tribal Sub-Plan and the Scheduled Caste Sub-Plan raise hopes of granting these decades-old schemes statutory status and ensuring allocation of funds in the Central and State budgets for their implementation. IN a significant legislative move, the Union government's Ministry of Tribal Affairs released a draft Bill for the implementation of the long-neglected Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP), a special programme mandated by the Planning Commission to benefit the...