-Hindustan Times Workers who have registered so far belong to diverse occupations, such as construction, apparel manufacturing, fishing, gig and platform work, street vending as well as domestic work. Nearly half of 40 million workers of the country’s informal economy registered on a recently launched national portal are women, and most workers regardless of gender are from disadvantaged castes, official data that shines new light on India’s invisible unorganised labour force shows. Trends...

-The Hindu Caste demographics do not have the deterministic effect on electoral outcomes that is often assumed As a new round of State elections approaches in India, political parties are crafting their electoral strategies. A large part of this exercise consists of constituency mapping, or gathering data about caste and community demographics, information about the local balance of power between groups, and the identification of local caste leaders, with the aim of...

-The Hindu MHA had announced that data on OBCs would be collected in 2021 Census The Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI) has said that deliberations and file notings regarding the Central government’s announcement in 2018 to collect data on Other Backward Classes (OBC) as part of Census 2021, is not available with its office. The RGI, in its response to an RTI query filed by The Hindu, added that...

The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...

-The Hindu * Why did the government file an affidavit in the Supreme Court regarding the caste census? What is the status of the data collected under the SECC-2011 census? The story so far: In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court on September 23, the Union government has categorically ruled out conducting a Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), stating that a caste census (except that for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes...