-TheWire.in A look at how the country’s political heavyweights deal with environmental issues and livelihoods in their poll manifestos Twin crises beset India today: serious unemployment and the loss of livelihoods, along with the collapse of the ecological basis on which we all survive. Any political party that does not deal with these is not serious about the country’s future. So how well do the country’s political heavyweights, the Congress and the BJP,...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Unemployment: Why Amitabh Kant and Surjit Bhalla are Wrong -R Ramakumar
-Newsclick.in The arguments put forward by the two government advocates to disparage the NSSO’s thwarted report only serve to create a smokescreen so that any meaningful debate on unemployment becomes impossible. In 1965, P. C. Mahalanobis, who founded India’s modern statistical system, wrote a famous article titled “Statistics as a Key Technology” in the journal The American Statistician. One argument in the paper was as follows. Prior to the emergence of science...
More »Veil on job data spurs poser: How deep is the crisis? -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph Demand for work under the MGNREGA was at its highest in the 2018-19 fiscal The job crisis has deepened and become more commonplace during the last five years, according to officials familiar with employment data. Consider this: Demand for work under the national job scheme, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), was at its highest in the 2018-19 fiscal. Started in 2006 to provide a fallback employment source to...
More »Where India's jobs mess is most acute
-The Economic Times India had a joblessness rate of 6.1% in 2017-18, a huge jump over the 2.2% registered in 2011-12, a report says. After the NSSO data leak episode which revealed a 45-year jobs low for India that the government had a hard time countering, here comes another significant set of findings from the same source. More than a third of India's states - 11 states to be precise - had unemployment...
More »The self-employment conundrum -Arindam Gupta
-The Telegraph Funding small entrepreneurs will require more bank loans, preferably collateral-free, which will generate more NPAs The government has been compelling banks to adopt a softer lending policy to promote self-employment. The Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, launched in 2015, provides collateral-free loans to small entrepreneurs outside the farming sector in three categories: Rs 50,000 loan in the ‘Shishu’, Rs 5,00,000 in the ‘Kishore’ and Rs 10,00,000 in the ‘Tarun’ segments respectively....
More »