-Business Standard The large informal sector is a consequence - not a cause - of the low level of development For decades, one of the central aims of economic policy in India has been to create conditions for workers to move from low- to high-income employment. This has usually implied a shift from the informal sector where productivity is low, to the formal sector where productivity is high. This process of “formalisation”...

-Livemint.com Farmers need structural reforms, crop diversification and greater public investment rather than subsidies and price support Indian agriculture has been relatively untouched by the structural reforms that lifted Incomes in other parts of the economy. Low farm productivity meant that governments tried to improve the lot of farmers through price policy. The problem is that engineering a shift in the terms of trade through higher support prices usually leads to generalized...

-Livemint.com Despite economic growth, 72% of workers in South Asia including India and 46% in South-eastern Asia will have vulnerable employment by 2019 New Delhi: The Asia-Pacific region will add 23 million jobs between 2017-19, aided by employment growth in South Asian nations, including India, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). But a lot of the jobs being created are of poor quality despite strong economic growth and some 77% of workers...

-The Indian Express The crisis in the crop’s prices in two of the four years of the Modi government illustrate that farmers no longer matter to it. Farmers are habitually great raconteurs. My grandfather would often narrate an episode, when he encountered a farmer sitting by a heap of potatoes in the middle of the night. On investigating what compelled the farmer to guard potatoes when there were no buyers, he was...

-TheWire.in The proposed Market Assurance Scheme should not leave states to fend for themselves when it comes to price support for farmers, especially as the agrarian crisis is one that is caused mainly by central policies. The Budget season, that too in the last full year before the 2019 general elections, brings the debate back to agriculture in the country. Apart from several farmers’ struggles across the country, including the unprecedented unified...