-Down to Earth Child marriages surged after COVID-19 first wave; streamlined state efforts helped arrest the trend, claim officials As many as 3,970 villages in Odisha were declared child marriage-free between January and the first week of July 2021. The development has coincided with second wave of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic; the state had registered a surge in child marriages during the first wave. In 2020, only 62 villages were declared...

-Livemint.com The aim is to enrol nearly 380 mn workers and provide them benefits during times of distress The Union government will roll out the unorganized sector database by the end of July to enrol almost 380 million workers, weeks after the Supreme Court rapped the labour ministry, saying that it showed “unpardonable" apathy towards workers in the informal sector. The development comes more than a year after the mass reverse migration of...

-Livemint.com The lack of jobs is forcing many people to stop looking for one and thus drop out of the workforce. Here’s the good news first. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the unemployment rate for June 2021 fell to 9.17%. It was at 11.9% in May. The following chart plots the unemployment rate since January 2016, the period for which this data is available. As can be seen from...

The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

-Livemint.com India has had the seventh-longest school closure in the world, affecting over 300 million school-children. Underprivileged students without access to smartphones and computers have been hit hardest For most people across the world, how much they earn is determined by how wealthy and well-educated their parents were. But the degree of ‘persistence’ in incomes across generations is much higher in India than in other developing countries, a team of World Bank...