-The Hindu Ensuring government support for financial incentives, upgrading technologies and reskilling labour are key challenges South Asia became a major player in the global textiles and clothing market with the onset of the third wave of global production. Bangladesh joined the league in the 1980s, owing to the outbreak of the civil war in Sri Lanka. Supportive industrial policy was an instrumental factor in the 1990s, with zero duty on raw...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-FinancialExpress.com Recent registrations cited as proof of job creation were mostly formalisation of existing jobs Defending the Centre’s record on employment, prime minister Narendra Modi, in a speech in Rajya Sabha, talked about the impressive net enrolment to Employment Provident Fund Organization (EPFO): during 2021, 1.20 crore beneficiaries were enrolled under EPF—about 65 lakh beneficiaries in the 18-25 age bracket, implying they are first-time entrants to the Labour Market. He connected the...

-The Hindu High demand in migrant destination States, not source States: it says Demand for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme has dropped from the peak of the first lockdown, but is still higher than pre-COVID levels, the Department of Economic Affairs said in its annual Economic Survey, noting that this is “an indicator of rural Labour Markets”. However, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about the movement...

-The Hindu Policy efforts to formalise the economy will have limited results as the bulk of informal units are petty producers Since 2016, the Government has made several efforts to formalise the economy. Currency demonetisation, introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), digitalisation of financial transactions and enrolment of informal sector workers on numerous government Internet portals are all meant to encourage the formalisation of the economy. But why the impetus...