-NDTV.com In February 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a speech in Parliament, ridiculed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) program as a symbol of the policy failures of the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government headed by Dr. Manmohan Singh and, in his typical coarse style, taunted that he would bleed the program to a slow death. Exactly six years later, on February 12, 2021, Finance Minister Nirmala...

-IndiaSpend.com More younger workers, and women, lost jobs and struggled to recover them. Even after employment rates recovered, quality of employment deteriorated, with individuals moving into less secure self-employment in agriculture, construction and small-scale trade. Bengaluru: The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a large and sustained economic shock to the global economy. In India, the effect can be broadly divided into two phases--the shock of the nationwide lockdown in the months of April...

-IndiaSpend.com Latest data indicate a structural shift away from organised sector jobs towards more insecure self-employment or unorganised sector jobs, Mahesh Vyas of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) tells us in this interview Mumbai: "We have an ageing population. If we have shrinking employment in urban places, if the better educated graduates or postgraduates are the ones who are losing jobs, how can we recover the economy from the downslide...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-Newsclick.in The government must analyse its existing data collection exercises, rationalise them and improve the inefficient statistical administration. It is good news that the Labour Bureau will revive its establishments-based Quarterly Employment Surveys or QES, using a larger sample. Since the Periodic Labour Force Surveys or PLFS collects data from households, the proposed quarterly survey of jobs will collect data from establishments. But it is advisable to review the multiple existing employment...