-The Indian Express The problem is under-employment. It won’t be resolved if the residually-employed are notionally shifted from the informal to formal sector. In an article in January, Soumya Kanti Ghosh and Pulak Ghosh (Ghosh and Ghosh) claimed that seven million new jobs have been created in the formal sector. Their claim is based on the increase in registration under the Employees Provident Fund (EPFO), National Pension Scheme and Employees State Insurance...

-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...

-Livemint.com China’s example shows the benefits of the rural workforce shifting from the farm to the non-farm sector The government announced its ambitious dream of doubling farmers’ income by 2022-23 in 2015-16. Incomes would have to grow annually by 10.4% to double in seven years. The data on growth rates of farm income given by NITI Aayog in its policy paper on doubling farmers’ income shows that the real income of farmers has...

-The Hindu India must debate solutions to the employment problem, as a true democracy should and would In January this year, the Prime Minister made this statement: “7 million new jobs created in 2017”. The statement draws on false conclusions of a study by two economists. Here is another: “10-12 million young people join the workforce every year and 7 million new and formal jobs were created in 2017,” said the Minister of...

-The Indian Express Incomparable data sets, cherry-picking, and dubious statistical analysis are behind the claims of robust employment growth. Only 1.4 million jobs were added in 2017. Surjit Bhalla has invented an estimate that 15 million jobs were created in 2017 (‘Robust job growth, not fake news,’ IE, April 28). This is an invention; it is not a discovery or an inference by honest statistical analysis. It is an invention because Bhalla...