-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...

-Hindustan Times Over 20% of the 7.7 million jobs in India’s gig economy are classified as high-skilled jobs and 31% as low-skilled jobs. The remaining 47% are classified as medium-skilled jobs India’s gig economy is estimated to employ 7.7 million people and is set to nearly triple to 23.5 million by 2029-30, a new report by the NITI Aayog said on Monday. The report, ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’, is the first...

-Newsclick.in India's job market is tightening, and Skilled Workers are finding it harder to enter the workforce. Government job drives and the informal economy have been unable to make up the difference. Pramod Lal is a 23-year-old recent business graduate from northern India, who thought he had the credentials to be competitive in the job market. However, Lal's attempts to start a career have yet to succeed. "Education is no guarantee for a...

-India Spend/ Scroll.in These programmes should look at skilling the workforce for paid jobs rather than unpaid, part-time volunteers. Central government programmes on water emphasise groundwater management by the community in a decentralised manner but, by and large, these schemes are silent on the availability, training and deployment of a skilled workforce for this task, especially in rural areas. Water management at the most decentralised, local levels is often a part-time, volunteer or...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...