In the recent week, the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) has dealt three major, concerted blows to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA): (1) The Budget allocation for NREGA was reduced to just Rs 60,000 crore in 2023-24 (less than Rs 50,000 crore if we deduct wage arrears from 2022-23). This makes this year’s allocation the lowest as a proportion of GDP (0.2%) in the history of the programme. (2) The...
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Big industries don’t observe uniform labour standards in India: Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh at ILO meet -AM Jigeesh
-The Hindu BMS chief Hiranmay Pandya said workers face low wages, lack of job security and social security benefits, and had to suffer poor working conditions this year On the second day of the Asia Pacific Regional Meeting of the International Labour Organisation (APRM of ILO), representatives of workers and employers from India on Wednesday highlighted the employment situation in the country. While employers hailed the Union government’s steps to “help” workers...
More »Is EPFO data right metric to show job creation? No, say experts citing its data limitations -TCA Sharad Raghavan
-ThePrint.in Wage ceiling, mobility of lower-end workers, smaller establishments willfully avoiding registrations among factors that make EPF data flawed indicator, they assert New Delhi: While the government often cites monthly data from the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) — the latest edition of which was released on Friday — to show that formal sector employment is growing in India, economists say that the data is flawed, prone to inflation and captures only...
More »Poverty, Inequality and a Pay Scale That Depends on Contractors' Whims: Scenes From Narela -Deepanshu Mohan, Tavleen Kaur Saluja, Jignesh Mistry, Hima Trisha and Sriniket Bandaru
-TheWire.in The Narela industrial complex is one of the biggest in Asia, packed with booming small-scale industrial units. It runs entirely on the labour of low-income workers who have very little say on their pay and living conditions. In order to start liberalising trade and industrial production capacity through economic policy, the Indian nation-state began implementing a set of Washington Consensus style neo-liberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. The liberalisation push across...
More »Quality of work matters, and not just job creation
Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India. Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...
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