-MoneyControl.com A continued property market slowdown and a vegetable glut may have pushed landless labourers back to villages, seeking daily jobs and depressing wage growth India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth looks set to cruise along the 7-7.5 percent trail, partly aided by steady farm incomes and record harvests on the back of plentiful summer rains over the last three years. But it may still be early to open the bubbly yet.  The...

-Livemint.com Rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha on how MGNREGS has evolved since 2006 to result in income, acreage, water tables, productivity and fodder availability Agrarian distress and rural distress are terms used interchangeably, but the rural economy today is very different from what it was many years ago, given the diversification of rural incomes and hence incorrect to think one means the other, says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, ministry of rural development. In...

-The Hindu Business Line By converting a necessity into a virtue, the government has decided to release the large inventory of procured pulses to different States at a discounted rate for utilisation in various welfare programs. Necessity because the stocks continue to occupy scarce warehousing space and incur huge carrying costs. Also, the Centre thinks, warehousing space may be needed during the upcoming kharif harvest less than six weeks away; and of course,...

-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-Newsclick.in By all accepted standards, the official minimum wages in states are just enough to keep the worker alive. What they actually get is even less. Minimum wages of industrial workers in India are less than half of what a justifiable calculation – based on minimum calorific intake and the barest minimum of other expenses – suggests. While the central govt. using a well-accepted standard formula provides Rs.18,000 per month to its...