-Livemint.com Rural workers’ real wage rate growth was very high in 2014, but has fallen dramatically since then Rural wage growth for men for both agricultural and non-agricultural occupations (simple average) was 3.53% in March from a year ago. But consumer price inflation for rural India was 4.44% in March. That means the real rural wage growth, or wage growth after taking inflation into account, was negative during the month. In other...

-Livemint.com There isn’t any big base effect at work here, so the fall in wage growth is the result either of less demand for rural labour or more supply. Either way, it points to rural distress If economic growth is picking up, as all experts agree, why is growth in rural wages faltering? The accompanying chart shows that growth in rural wages for men, taken as the simple average wage rate for...

-CaravanMagazine.in The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and...

-News18.com In an interview with News18’s Rupashree Nanda, Dreze, who was a member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and an architect of the National Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), says that there have been no major initiatives in the social field in the last four years, with the partial exception of Swachh Bharat. Government data reveal that the Indian economy is growing at a robust rate but noted economist Jean Dreze believes...

-The Hindu Amid criticism from SC/ST panel, experts say project must continue Now in her late twenties, Veeramma Selvan of Thekkekadampara tribal hamlet in Sholayur gram panchayat of Attappady has reasons to believe that her gods have stopped smiling. It was in January last year that she lost her five-month-old, underweight son Balu — her fourth child — allegedly due to milk aspiration. (a medical condition in which the mother's milk goes...