-The Times of India Over 113 million persons were "seeking or available for work", that is, they were unemployed, according to Census 2011 data released today. This huge number made up around 15% of the working age population of about 748 million persons in the 15 to 60 years age group. These unemployed persons were distributed over nearly 70 million families or households. That's about 28% of all households in the...

-The Hindu The Odisha government has made the right announcements to improve the plight of migrant workers, but a lot more needs to be done In December 2013, a labourer chopped off the palms of two migrant workers from western Odisha. He had paid them an advance for working in the brick kilns of Hyderabad and did not take kindly to their arguing with him about the payment and place of work....

-The Indian Express The MGNREGS stands out as one of the Indian government's most ambitious social schemes, with far-reaching consequences throughout the economy. The only known recipe for poverty eradication is a combination of high growth and high development spending. Neither is sufficient. A recent study (Kapoor and Ahluwalia, 2012) has shown that post-liberalisation, one champion of poverty reduction in India is Andhra Pradesh. This reduction in poverty is widespread, as...

-The Hindu Providing access to credit likely to be a hard step For Prime Minister Narendra Modi's newly launched Jan Dhan Yojana to be successful, India needs to provide over 100 million households access to banks, data show. An even harder step, however, is likely to be access to credit. As of March 2012, the most recent year for which relevant Reserve Bank of India (RBI) statistics are available, India had over 900...

-DNA The aim is to drive farmers out of agriculture and turn food production into industrial enterprise Some years ago, former President APJ Abdul Kalam was addressing students at an annual event organised by K Govindacharya's Bhartiya Swabhiman Andolan at Gulbarga in Karnataka. He exhorted students to work hard, educate themselves to become doctors, engineers, civil servants, scientists, economists and entrepreneurs. After he had ended his talk, a young student got...