Incidence of 'vulnerable employment' is highest in South Asia, including India, with 580 million people in the region falling under the category, says the annual Global Employment Trends report of the International Labour Organisation. People in the vulnerable employment category in the region are saddled with low wages and little social protection, said the report. In fact, the whole of Asia Pacific region had a comparatively higher level of vulnerable employment...

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule. In effect, in...

The rapid growth of global markets has not seen the parallel development of social and economic institutions to ensure balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth. Although we may not have yet reached “the end of history,” globalisation has brought us closer to “the end of geography” as we have known it. The compression of time and space triggered by the Third Industrial Revolution —roughly, since 1980 — has changed our interactions with...

‘Linking the question to annihilation of caste is an important research agenda' ‘Dalits' position relative to dominant castes has not improved significantly' Participants at a national seminar on ‘Dalit households in village economies,' which began here on Friday, affirmed that a lasting solution to India's “agrarian question” — characterised by extreme inequalities in the distribution of land — was inseparably linked to the widespread discrimination of Dalits. Speaking at the inaugural session of...

Over the past decade, as crops have failed year after year, 200,000 farmers have killed themselves Naryamaswamy Naik went to the cupboard and took out a tin of pesticide. Then he stood before his wife and children and drank it. "I don't know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn't say," Sugali Nagamma said, her tiny grandson playing at her feet. "I'd tell him: don't worry, we...