-Livemint.com Preference for Government Jobs is highest among college-educated rural youth, a segment seen at the forefront of recent agitations for quotas, shows analysis In one of the largest such exercises ever conducted in the world, millions of applicants are appearing this month for an online recruitment test conducted by the Indian Railways. The Railways Recruitment Board (RRB) has received more than 24 million applications for roughly 120,000 vacancies in the organization. Most...

-Business Standard The payroll data has been revised downwards for each of the nine months between September 2017 and May this year New Delhi: The net enrolment numbers released by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has been revised down by 12.4 per cent for the September-May period, from an earlier estimate of 4.5 million to 3.9 million. The payroll count in June rose by 24 per cent to 793,308. The net enrolment...

-TheWire.in The Ayushman Bharat scheme provides support to the most deprived portion of India’s population and engages private insurance players, positive steps that must be welcomed. In his speech on the 72nd Independence Day this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi remarked that India’s economy, once a sleeping elephant is now running. The same cannot, however be said about the healthcare system of India. This elephant is malnourished, weak, diseased and lumbering at...

Good news about digital inclusion often leaves little room for reporting on bad experiences, which netizens encounter in the digital world. A recent report by LIRNEAsia – an ICT [information and communication technology] policy and regulation think tank working in the Asia-Pacific – says that almost one among five Indian netizens in the age-group 15-65 years had faced online harassment in 2017. In contrast, roughly twelve out of hundred internet...

-Vikalp.ind.in In a recent interview with the Swarajya magazine, the Prime Minister of India apparently said, ‘more than a lack of jobs, the issue is a lack of data on jobs’[1]. For those of us who have been using the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data on employment and unemployment for decades now, such a statement made by the government, come as a surprise. As a researcher I have been using...