The Union Budget 2020-21, which was presented by the Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman on 1st February, 2020 has failed to impress civil society activists and farmers' rights groups (click here and here). Through their press releases and notes, members of CSOs were demanding as well as suggesting the Union Government for hiking the budgetary allocation for schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and Pradhan Mantri...
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Mind the statistics gap -C Rangarajan & S Mahendra Dev
-The Indian Express Growing divergence between consumption expenditure estimates from NSO surveys and GDP data is too big to be pushed under the carpet Recently, we had expressed concerns that with the GDP growth rate falling in the post 2011-12 period, the decline in the poverty ratio would be slow. During 2011-12 to 2018-19, both GDP and agriculture growth were lower than in the earlier period. The terms of trade were not...
More »Real rural wages plunge 3.8 per cent in September -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express The daily wage rate in rural India for male workers across 25 occupations (12 agricultural and 13 non-agricultural) averaged Rs 331.29 during September, as per field data compiled by the Labour Bureau. Real rural wages growth has fallen to an all-time-low of minus 3.8% in September, further confirming the deep structural slowdown in ‘Bharat’ that is also evidenced in sluggish fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and two-wheeler sales. The daily wage...
More »Key sales numbers show rural demand may dip further -P Vaidyanathan Iyer
-The Indian Express Warning signs across FMCG, tractors & 2-wheelers, gold, real rural wages THE GOVERNMENT Friday claimed that a significant divergence in levels of consumption and direction of change prompted it to withhold the findings of the survey on household consumption expenditure for July 2017-June 2018. But all major indicators of rural demand suggest the situation has only worsened since the beginning of financial year 2019-20, and the economy is...
More »Strengthening MGNREGA for reviving the economy -Surajit Das
-Newsclick.in Even if the wage rates under MGNREGA are doubled and if jobs are provided for at least 100 days in a year as per the law, the extra expenditure would not exceed 1% of GDP. The growth rate is slowing down in India neither because of lower productivity of the labourers or that of the land, nor because of shortage of labour or productive capacity, but because of the lack of...
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