-The Hindu Business Line How trained youth from rural India fare in urban work spaces Yesterday was World Youth Skills Day (July 15), an opportune time to meet some of the country’s rural youth who have recently skilled under government programmes and moved to work in the Delhi NCR region. Outside their comfort zone and working in the competitive, urban environment for the first time, life can be challenging on all fronts. Ask 30-year-old...

-The Hindu Business Line ‘Astonished’ RSS-backed farmers’ body seeks immediate roll-back New Delhi: The Centre’s nod for 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in trading of food products with “no riders”, has not only raised the hackles of the Food Processing Ministry, which has been pushing for 15 per cent mandatory investment in creation of back-end infrastructure to reduce wastage and create jobs, but has also irked farmers organisations, such as...

-The Hindu Business Line The unique needs of those who work in cities even as they maintain homes in the village must be addressed by policymakers   Cities bring with them a sense of permanence. Many of them have been around for hundreds of years. Some of their more memorable institutions too tend to have long histories. It is no surprise, then, that most of urban policy takes aspects of a city to...

-The Indian Express Real wages have risen across India in the past two decades, but the increase has been especially marked among rural unskilled workers. Three drivers — falling rural female labour force participation, a construction boom, and favourable agricultural terms of trade — help explain why unskilled rural workers fared better than their urban counterparts or workers with more education. Going forward, in the light of lower agricultural prices and...

-The Indian Express Between 2005 and 2012, structural changes drove poverty reduction — non-agricultural incomes rose the fastest, and the largest shifts from farm to salaried non-farm employment were seen among the poorest. The significant shift from farm work to non-farm sources of income accelerated the decline in poverty in India. Non-farm jobs pay more than agricultural labour, and incomes from both were propelled by a steep rise in wages for rural...