KEY TRENDS • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Gig workers: Long hours, little pay, scant security -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph Delivery team, beauticians’ lives ruled by phone calls and sprints to customers New Delhi: The company Pinki Saini began working for in 2018 did not pay her. Instead, she paid the company for letting her work for it. When she started the job as a beautician with Urbanclap — now known as Urban Company — Pinki says she had to pay the firm a “joining fee” of Rs 4,000. She also...
More »Perils of the Gig Economy -Asiya Islam and Damni Kain
-TheIndiaForum.in The uncritical tone of the NITI Aayog’s recent report on the gig economy in India and its belief that platformisation will create an inclusive working environment is, at best, credulous, and, at worst, a deliberate attempt to ignore the erosion of workers’ rights, security, and welfare. In August 2022, more than a hundred workers in Bengaluru working for online food ordering and delivery platform Swiggy went on strike. Echoing central trade...
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)...
More »India’s ‘salaried class’ shrank during Covid, Muslims hit hardest, govt data suggests -Nikhil Rampal
-ThePrint.in India’s salaried class shrank by 2.7 percentage points during pandemic, govt’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows. But data for religious minorities, women is even bleaker. New Delhi: There’s much to lament in India’s post-Covid job market, where recovery has been painfully slow. However, government data suggests that when it comes to the salaried sector, the participation of religious minorities — Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, in that order — has been...
More »