'They are afraid that if they approach a police station for filing a complaint they might themselves get arrested under some random charges.'
'Nobody is talking about the inequality that is going to come.'
India's gig workforce is expected to expand to 2.35 crore by 2029-30 from 77 lakh in 2020-21, a NITI Aayog report said on Monday, and recommended extending social security measures for such workers and their families in partnership mode as envisaged in Code on Social Security. The report titled 'India's Booming Gig and Platform Economy' further said gig workers are expected to form 6.7 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce or 4.1 per cent of the total livelihood in India by 2029-30. Gig workers can be broadly classified into platform and non-platform workers.
The government is targeting export of goods and services worth $2 trillion by 2030.
Around 275,000 migrant labourers and their family members have returned to the state. According to the state government, this number could exceed 1 million by the end of this month. As the NDA government in Bihar is scheduled to face polls at the end of this year, providing livelihoods to these people is on the top Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's agenda.
When was the last time we heard this government speaking of the disaster in primary education, rather than Ganga cruises and cheetahs? Less money -- Rs 88,000 crore -- was spent by the Union government on education in its last Budget than has been allocated to the Bullet train, notes Aakar Patel.
Of the total cash outgo Rs 40,000 crore is towards enhanced expenditure under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program and Rs 33,771.48 crore have been sought for direct benefit transfer under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and National Social Assistance Programme.
The richest one per cent in India now own more than 40 per cent of the country's total wealth, while the bottom half of the population together share just 3 per cent of wealth, a new study showed on Monday. Releasing the India supplement of its annual inequality report on the first day of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, rights group Oxfam International said that taxing India's ten-richest at 5 per cent can fetch entire money to bring children back to school. "A one-off tax on unrealized gains from 2017-2021 on just one billionaire, Gautam Adani, could have raised Rs 1.79 lakh crore, enough to employ more than five million Indian primary school teachers for a year," it added.
Tamil Nadu is the celebrated home of the 'social justice' movement in the country, yet caste differences and violence has only been increasing in numbers and becoming more brutal in recent years, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Taking Narendra Modi head-on, Rahul Gandhi on Saturday accused Gujarat government of offering Rs 40,000 crore worth of farmland at throw away prices to an industrialist while seeking higher rates from the Air Force.
A day after the Congress brainstormed over its electoral reverses, senior leader M Veerappa Moily on Monday said Sonia Gandhi should take "full control" of the party with a free hand to change non-performing leaders, and asserted that a "mere culture of tweets and social media propaganda" would not take the organisation forward.
The income inequality gap was found to be highest in South Africa and lowest in Denmark.
Rural outlay may go up 23% to reduce pains of demonetisation
The notion that the BJP gained its increased tally by wiping out the Left parties and the Congress is completely misleading. Equally misleading is the belief that the TMC held its ground in all its existing seats. A little more than a fifth of the seats Mamata Banerjee's party had won in 2016 was lost to the BJP this time.
The incident took place on Wednesday afternoon in Demchok sector, located 250 km east of Leh, where the work for linking a village with 'hot spring' was being undertaken under the MNREGA.
India's likely medium-term potential growth will almost certainly be markedly lower than that experienced in pre-pandemic years, warns Shankar Acharya, former chief economic advisor to the Government of India.
Anil Rego, CEO, Right Horizons, answers your personal income tax queries.
In a notification, the Union Home Ministry said an eligible beneficiary desirous of receiving the benefit under the 'Central Scheme for Assistance to Civilian Victims/Family of Victims of Terrorist/Communal/LWE Violence and Cross Border Firing and Mine/IED Blasts on Indian Territory' is required to furnish proof of possession of Aadhaar number or undergo Aadhaar authentication.
In two and a half years, first PM-like action by Modi: Rahul Gandhi on India's surgical strikes
'The Modi government must create conditions to integrate millions into the rural economy as many migrants are certainly not going to return to live an undignified life,' notes Ramesh Menon.
NDA under Mr Modi is as focused on the rural poor with doles and hand-outs as the UPA under Dr Singh was.
Archana Ramanan, a homemaker from Tamil Nadu, tells Rediff.com's A Ganesh Nadar what she would like to see in Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's Budget.
'It is just an excuse to say that the Centre has run out of money.' 'Pruning these schemes would mean hard time for the people of India.'
The focus is likely to be on consolidation and improvement of existing rural-centric programmes to ensure their completion ahead of the next general elections in 2019, rather than announcement of new schemes. Sanjeeb Mukherjee and Arup Roychoudhury report.
The new government may enhance the Plan expenditure for 2014-15 by around Rs 11,000 crore (Rs 110 billion) in the Budget next month, which would be about 2 per cent higher than what was provided in the previous fiscal budget.
For states like West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, where migration is high, the return of workers could be as much an opportunity as a liability. All states have launched portals to register migrant workers; additional fields like nature of employment and remuneration in the past 2-3 years are being added to help in skill mapping.
'The Jharkhand government is increasingly intolerant of voices of dissent.' 'Recently 20 persons, including activists, writers and academics, were booked for sedition.' 'Many of them have been critical of the government's apathy towards Adivasis,' notes Siraj Dutta.
'India is showing a reasonable amount of resilience, but we are still living in a world that is quite fragile.' 'That's why we hope that the government will continue to invest significantly in public capex so that we are able to ride through this cycle till the private sector is able to play its part in investing and adding to the capex cycle.'
The government is doing things in agriculture that count for little, says Shreekant Sambrani.
'To set up a successful business, one must have a solution to an existing problem or a better way of addressing the current solution.'
Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge, speaking on the Motion of Thanks on the President's address, charged the government with not delivering on its various promises, including generating two crore jobs per year.
'According to CMIE data, employment in manufacturing saw a reduction from 51 million in the country in 2016 to 27 million in 2021. 'That is, it has halved in just 5 years. 'At the same time, the national lockdown resulted in reverse migration to rural areas, and an increase in the number of workers in agriculture. 'It also means joblessness has increased in agriculture because there are too many workers; the number of workers went up from 200 million to 232 million.'
The government last fiscal missed its direct tax collection target, and for this financial year it has set a higher revenue mobilisation goal of Rs 13.80 lakh crore.
Dr Rakesh Mohan, former RBI deputy governor, and Dr Pronab Sen, former chairman of the Indian Statistical Commission discuss the issues facing the Indian rural and manufacturing sectors and what the government must possibly do to improve demand and perk up the Indian economy
The party's research department team, which Rajya Sabha member M V Rajeev Gowda heads, has sifted through the suggestions received in the last five months, and the manifesto is slated to be released later this month, reports Archis Mohan.
he government is examining a plan of bank recapitalisation and considering an urban version of MNREGS.
Maharashtra has the opportunity to solve all these problems by voting for the Congress and NCP, he said.
'For the politics of patronage in West Bengal, it has always been important to have territorial control.'
The Bharatiya Janata Party in Gujarat is hoping to make a clean sweep in the Dalit and tribal-dominated Sabarkantha district comprising four Assembly constituencies even as unemployment has become a major issue that the ruling party hopes to negate with Hindutva and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's charisma.
She said that despite government scheme and initiatives ranging from roads to agriculture, housing, scholarships to electricity benefiting lives of people, a false narrative was being created by the opposition that the government was working for cronies.
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