-PTI Nearly 1,500 families are heading to their home towns every day Left with no source of income, workers in Surat’s diamond industry are leaving the city in large numbers. After being forced to down shutters in March-end owing to the COVID-19 outbreak, business resumed in the second week of June. However, over 600 workers and their families have tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the Surat Municipal Corporation to order the closure of...

-The Hindu The exodus of migrant labour from Gujarat highlights the indifference of States to their well being and rights Gujarat is one of the top States in India that receive migrant workers, largely temporary and seasonal, on a large scale. In Gujarat, they work in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in a wide range of activities such as in agriculture, brick kilns and construction work, salt pans and domestic work, petty services...

-The Economic Times If anyone thinks jail is a leveller of gender discrimination, think again. It can be quite stark, even in jail. The men and women in Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad are treated quite differently as far as work is concerned. In stereotypical fashion, only the men in the jail got to work, while the women had nothing to do and no opportunity to earn. The men in this jail make...

-The Hindu A more progressive Central law on land acquisition is now in place, but several States have already either amended the new law or enacted legislation of their own. On August 31, the Supreme Court in Kedar Nath Yadav v. State of West Bengal delivered one of the most momentous decisions of the year. It invalidated the expropriation of land in Singur by the erstwhile Left Front government in Bengal, and...

KEY TRENDS  • The new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million @* • The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the...