-Down to Earth Access to water, better infra drive marriage prospects as women yearn for more 'comfortable' lives Floods, droughts, floods again — Marathwada farmers have suffered at the hands of extreme weather events for decades. Their economic standings have taken a beating too, which has led to a unique problem: The chances of men from the affected villages getting married has started to thin.   Years of droughts and erratic rains have heavily...

-Livemint.com Tackle deficiencies of capital mobilization, access to state provisions and women’s participation to boost FPCs across India. In 2017, the Indian government reaffirmed its commitment to reduce rural distress among nearly 93 million farming households through efforts to double farmers’ income. What has been remarkable is the emergence of farmer producer companies (FPCs) as a viable way of supporting this approach. The last two years have been tumultuous. Pro-market legislation introduced in...

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...

-TheWire.in While employment was hit harder in urban areas due to the extent of disruption to urban business by the national lockdowns, rural India saw a more unequal distribution of these effects due to high discrimination. In the first article in this two-part series, we looked at the findings on discrimination in India’s labour market detailed in Oxfam’s India Discrimination Report 2022.  While that article detailed the extent of discrimination faced by Muslims,...

-Newsclick.in Three transformative steps could dramatically change this dire situation – provided Modi Govt. has the will to take them. Wage growth of households has declined from 8.2% in 2012-2016 to 5.7% in 2017-2021, according to a fresh study by a ratings agency. It will actually be even lower – around 1% - if inflation is taken into account. This slowing down of wage growth has happened in both rural and urban...