Economy

Migration in India 2020-21 report was recently released by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).   Report highlighted that, with the onset of covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, 0.7 per cent of India’s population was ‘temporary visitor’ in households during July 2020-June 2021. More than 84 per cent of these ‘temporary visitors’ moved places for reasons associated with pandemic ranging from loss of job/closure of educational institutions, family/relatives/friends, migration of earning member, health related issues and closure of educational institutions. Pandemic may have forced 51.6 per cent of men from urban India to migrate rural homes. There is a ... Read more

Migration in India 2020-21 report was recently released by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).   Report highlighted that, with the onset of covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, 0.7 per cent of India’s population was ‘temporary visitor’ in households during July 2020-June 2021. More than 84 per cent of these ‘temporary visitors’ moved places for reasons associated with pandemic ranging from loss of job/closure of educational institutions, family/relatives/friends, migration of earning member, health related issues and closure of educational institutions. Pandemic may have forced 51.6 per cent of men from urban India to migrate rural homes. There is a ... Read more

Annual report of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) was recently released by the government, for the period of July 2020 to June 2021. As per report, unemployment rate or proportion of persons in labour force who could not find jobs, decreased to 4.2 per cent in July 2020-June 2021 as opposed to 4.8 per cent last year. In 2018-19, the unemployment rate was 5.8 per cent, while 6.1 per cent in 2017-18. Joblessness has decreased gradually during four years till 2020-21. Unemployment rate among males has decreased to 4.5 per cent in 2020-21, as compared to 5.1 % in 2019-20, ... Read more

  Beti Bachao Beti Padho’.   The scheme ‘ Beti Bachao Beti Padho’ revolves around the notion of female feticides. It is campaign which aims at eradication of female feticides and to make girls socially and financially self-reliant through education. The movement came into force in 2015. It is a joint initiative run by the ministry of women and child development, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Ministry of human resource development. The movement also revolves around the actions to bridge the growing gap between the girl and boy infants.     Mahila-E-Haat   Mahila-E-Haat is a ... Read more

At the GST council meeting in December 2021, Tamil Nadu’s finance minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, opened the Pandora’s box by insisting that the Union government should compensate the states on market value in case of monetisation of assets of central public sector enterprises (CPSE’s) for which states had contributed land. This statement gives a new dimension to the proposed National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) where the Union government has announced that it wants to raise $81 billion by monetising government-owned tangible assets such as land, roads, stadiums and public sector undertakings (PSUs). State governments have largely extended various benefits to the Union government ... Read more

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) may be seen as one that offers relief to the poor in distress, but those poor ‘beneficiaries’ are in fact subsidising the creation of infrastructural assets to the tune of over Rs 20,000 crore a year, an analysis of its wage bill suggests. By paying MNREGS workers well under minimum wages, the government saved nearly Rs 42,000 crore in just the last two years, a period in which the poor faced severe economic distress due to Covid-induced disruptions.   The minimum wage ranges from Rs 441 in Karnataka to just Rs ... Read more

The top 30 export districts in India exported merchandise valued at more than $120 billion in the first two quarters of the fiscal — April to September 2021 — with petroleum and gem-and-jewellery trade leading the table. And, three districts from Karnataka — Bengaluru, Dakshina Kannada and Ballari — accounted for more than $7.8 billion of this. According to data from the Union ministry of commerce and industry, while Karnataka has three districts in the top 30, Gujarat with eight has the most, followed by seven in Maharashtra and four in Tamil Nadu. The remaining districts are from Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Odisha, ... Read more

The metaverse is a virtual world where people interact via their digital avatars!  In that virtual world, people will be able to do almost anything – go shopping, attend meetings, play with their friends and so on. This virtual universe can be accessed from devices like smartphones, or computers. However, to get the complete immersion experience – specific hardware devices like virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, gaming consoles etc are recommended. The metaverse is not yet a reality, it is still a work in progress. However, metaverse could be the next evolution of the internet. Many are hypothesising that ... Read more

India has imposed anti-dumping duty on five Chinese products, including certain aluminium goods and some chemicals, for five years to guard local manufacturers from cheap imports from the neighbouring country. A remedy sanctioned by the WTO to protect a member country’s domestic industry from imports that have been priced at levels below those prevailing in the exporting nation’s home market,  The anti-dumping duty has become one of India’s most widely used trade weapons, especially against a flood of cheaper Chinese imports. Anti-dumping measures are taken to ensure fair trade and provide a level playing field to the domestic industry. Both ... Read more

Gender inequality is the social process by which men and women are not treated as equals. The treatment may arise from distinctions regarding biology, psychology, or cultural norms. Some of these distinctions are empirically-grounded while others appear to be socially constructed. The under-representation of women in the workforce is both a social and economic loss. Globally, female participation in the labour force is about two-thirds that of men. There are still unwritten rules that a woman of today is expected to not overstep in any circumstances which are guided by ‘soft patriarchy’. Women also lack equal inheritance rights leading to ... Read more