The mainstream projections about India’s economic trajectory talk of how the country’s GDP will exceed that of Japan (whose economy today is more than thrice India’s size) by 2020. A large part of this sustained growth, it is assumed, will come from what is called the demographic dividend. India’s young and growing workforce, the standard argument goes, will ensure that the country’s wage rates keep it competitive for a long...

In April, India’s Planning Commission accepted recommendations put forth by the so-called Tendulkar Committee on a new poverty headcount for the country. Constituted by the Planning Commission under economist Suresh D Tendulkar, the committee, after four years and a new methodology, arrived at a new figure for the number of Indians living below the poverty line: 37.2 percent, ten points higher than the previous official figure. With the government’s subsequent...

The number of poor people in India is expected to halve by 2015, according to the 2010 Millennium Development Goals report released on Wednesday. The poverty rate in the country is slated to decline from 51% of the population in 1990 to 24% over the next five years. That translates into around 188 million more people meeting a minimum subsistence standard of $1.25 a day—the benchmark for the report's findings....

Beneficiaries of schemes under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will now get their wages without haing to go to the bank or post office and without seeking help from middlemen to complete the formalities. To ensure this, the state rural development department has sign an agreement with Union Bank which will provide biometric cards to the MGNREGA beneficiaries. The first lot of 5,000 biometric cards will be...

Built into the economic dogma of growth first is the ingrained notion held by large segments of the nation's elite that the fabric of inequality is meant to remain unimpaired.  “The Challenge of Employment in India; An Informal Economy Perspective” sums up the findings of a National Commission set up in September 2004 to review the status of the unorganised/ínformal sector in India (Volume I Main Report and volume II...