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The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Sankalp Patra for the 2024-25 Lok Sabha elections boasted of ``Guarantee for Swastha Bharat’’. However, the Union Health Budget 2024-25, coming soon after the elections, goes kaput on many of these!

“If the first thing you plan to ask a farmer who has allowed you – a total stranger from a faraway city – how much debt he or she’s under, the interview will end before it begins.”

Child malnourishment has been a long-standing reality in India. The Global Hunger Index (GHI), based on four indicators such as undernourishment, wasting (low weight for height), stunting (low height for age) and under-five mortality ranked India 101 out of the 116 countries in 2021. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) (2019-21), the proportion of children who suffered from stunting (low weight for their age) was 35.5 per cent and child wasting (low weight for their height) was about 19.3 per cent. The Anganwadi services under the Umbrella ICDS (Integrated Child Development Services) scheme are the backbone of India’s initiatives to address malnourishment. Anganwadi services are primarily aimed at overall child development, improving the nutrition and health status of the age group of 0-6 years. It also addresses the health and nutritional needs of pregnant and lactating mothers. The most pronounced aspect of pre-school non-formal education is only one of the components of the vast array of work undertaken by Anganwadi services.

The world has been facing a food crisis of unseen magnitude for many decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned in May that the “number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent life-saving food assistance and livelihood support continues to grow at an alarming rate”. This crisis has been in the making for some time, precipitated by the economic sanctions the United States and the European Union have imposed on Belarus and Russia.

The world has been facing a food crisis of a magnitude that has not been seen for many decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has warned that “the number of people facing acute food insecurity and requiring urgent life-saving food assistance and livelihood support continues to grow at an alarming rate”.

Indian farmers have been facing a major crisis since last year because of shortages in the availability and an unprecedented rise in prices of fertilizers. Fertilizers are a critical input for agriculture and a shortage in supply can significantly undermine national food security. Given this, secured supply of fertilizers is a key strategic interest for India. Although the government has increased subsidies to bring the prices down, this has not resolved the immediate problems. Also it has also not taken any serious actions to deal with the structural causes of the ongoing crisis.

Resolution of the land question in contemporary rural India remains an unfinished task and a critical issue. With neoliberalism as the dominant ideology guiding state policy, Indian state has abdicated the responsibility of implementing land reforms. This makes it even more important for people interested in progressive change to revisit the land question and the need for land reforms.

This paper, based on the valedictory address delivered by Professor John Harriss in the SSER conference “Exploring New Research Frontiers in Social Sciences”, talks about the importance of historical and contextually grounded studies of social processes.

A recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study shows the largest farms cultivate a high and increasing share of agricultural land in much of the world.

In this important webinar in the series “Three Decades of Economic Reforms”, Tejal Kanitkar and Prabir Purkayastha discuss various twists and turns in the history of power sector reforms.

The Society for Social and Economic Research is organising a Young Scholars’ Conference on “Exploring New Research Frontiers in Social Sciences”. The conference will be held on January 15–16, 2022 in online mode using zoom. Forty selected participants from various universities and research institutions in India would present their research papers in the conference. Please register for the conference using the following link.

The Consumer Pyramids Household Surveys (CPHS) are high-frequency large-scale surveys that have come to be used widely, particularly to assess the short-term changes in the economic conditions of households such as the impact of Covid-19 pandemic policies on the economy.

An updated version of this paper is available here.

Marking the anniversary of imposition of the COVID-19 lockdown in Inida, the Society for Social and Economic Research organised a conference, A Year Since the First COVID-19 Lockdown: India’s Unfolding Crisis, on March 25-26, 2021. Speakers at the conference discussed a wide range of issues related to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies that were used to mitigate the crisis. The talks and discussions from the conference can be viewed using the following links.

This monograph examines land relations in the village of Aavli in the Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh. It draws upon data on the socio-economic profile of households, land ownership and tenancy collected via a census-type survey in 2018–19.

The economic reforms which were started in 1991 shifted the focus of fertilizer policies away from playing a leading role in building the fertilizer industry and ensuring the availability of fertilizers at affordable prices to farmers. Under the neo-liberal policy framework, reducing the fiscal burden of fertilizer subsidies and the foreign exchange burden of fertilizer-related imports became the overriding concerns of the state. Interestingly, the post-liberalisation policies have not only spectacularly failed in both these objectives, they have also resulted in a surge in the prices of fertilizers other than urea, and vastly accentuated the urea bias in nutrient application in Indian agriculture. The analysis in this paper shows that the decontrolling of the prices of fertilizers other than urea through the Nutrient Based Subsidy scheme has resulted in a situation in which, while the state continues to incur a huge amount of expenditure on subsidies for these fertilizers, fertilizer companies are not required to pass on the benefits to farmers.

This article provides a critical assessment of the likely impact of the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 (FPTCA). It has been argued by the government that this act will lead to transparent and barrier-free trade in agricultural produce, and that the emergence of alternative private marketing channels will result in better price realisation for farmers’ produce.

Lack of preparedness to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in enormous hardships to farmers and rural workers, has caused considerable economic losses, and has dealt a serious blow to India’s rural economy. This paper discusses different ways in which agriculture and the rural economy of India have been impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown. It presents a details analysis of whatever data have become available to show that there is a large gap between the claims made by the government of support it has provided to rural households, and the reality that farmers and rural workers find themselves confronted with.

This paper shows that the lack of planning and preparation before implementation of the lockdown resulted in closure of all MGNREGS work for about one month during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Although the government exempted the MGNREGS from lockdown restrictions on April 20^th, the revival of work under the scheme has been slow. Problems in availability of funds and other administrative hurdles are the main reasons for this. The paper argues that a significant enhancement of employment creation through the MGNREGS can be critical for the revival of the economy for which collapse of demand is currently the biggest hurdle.

The sudden announcement of a national lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in a severe disruption of food supply chains. The lockdown was announced without any preparation, and nothing was mentioned about excluding agricultural production and marketing operations from the purview of the lockdown when the Prime Minister first announced these restrictions. Once the lockdown was announced, governments scrambled to keep the supply chains functioning. On March 27, the third day of the lockdown, government announced that the agricultural marketing operations were exempted from lockdown restrictions.

Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) is one of the flagship schemes of the Modi Government. Launched on May 1, 2016, PMUY, through which subsidised LPG connections were claimed to have been provided to about 4.5 crore poor households until 2018, is widely believed to have brought major political dividends to NDA in the 2019 elections.

On October 2, 2019, Prime Minister Modi proudly proclaimed that India, which was home to the largest number of people in the world not having access to toilets, has become open defecation free. Is that true? Recently released data from the 76th round NSO survey show that the reality is very far from this claim, and that India continues to have the dubious distinction of being the country with largest number of households without a toilet.

The State in India, barring the Left-led governments, has never been committed to implementing redistributive land reforms and securing rights of tenants. After 1991, when India adopted the policies of liberalisation and globalisation, the government stopped paying even the lip service to the programme of land reforms as they did until then. In fact, some of the recent policy documents, most notably the 2016 Report of the Haque Committee, have openly argued for reversing land reform laws.

The production, trade and consumption of pulses have seen substantial growth over the last fifteen years. This report examines the trends and patterns of this growth, and the factors that explain these for different kinds of pulses. The report presents an analysis of trends of consumption of pulses in different regions of the world and discusses the role that pulses can play in human nutrition. The report presents an analysis of the dynamics of growth of major pulses in different pulse-producing countries of the world. It describes the increasingly important role of trade in the global economy of pulses and presents an analysis of changing patterns of trade. The report argues that there is a pressing need to close the large gap between potential and actual yields, particularly on smallholder farms in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, by increased adoption of improved varieties and modern agronomic practices in all developing countries. This in turn requires a major thrust in agricultural research and extension, improving credit availability, and public investment directed at pulse production. The report discusses future prospects and policy imperatives for sustaining the growth of pulse production.

The Indian economy is going through a severe economic crisis. What caused the crisis and how serious is it? What are the remedies available in a situation like this? Is government’s response to the crisis adequate to deal with the problem or is it likely to worsen it?

On June 18, 2019, Professor Abhijit Sen spoke on “Macroeconomics of Indian Agriculture in the Post-Reform Period” at the Society for Social and Economic Research Office in New Delhi.

The central government has finally allowed the release of the report of the 2017-18 Periodic Labour Force Survey. The previous government had blocked its release before elections because the survey showed a massive increase in the unemployment rate, worst in the last 45 years. Some data from the report that were leaked in the media showed that there had been a massive contraction in rural employment. In these Lok Sabha elections, BJP tried every trick, and with remarkable success, to distract the voters away from issues such as unemployment and livelihoods. The report perhaps saw light of the day formally only because, having won the elections with a massive mandate, the primary purpose of blocking the release of this report ceased to be relevant.

India is the country with largest number of people who face chronic hunger and are unable to consume even minimum dietary energy that is required given their age, body mass and activity level. This paper estimates that, in 2011-12, 39 per cent of the Indian population – a staggering 472 million people – faced chronic hunger and were unable to consume even minimally adequate amount of food.

A severe contraction of employment took place in India between 2004–05 and 2011–12. NSSO surveys show a fall in work participation rates in rural and urban areas, and for men and women. This monograph presents a detailed age-cohort analysis to throw light on dynamics of changes in structure of employment in the economy.

The agrarian sector of the economy has been suffering from an intense crisis over the last four years. The agrarian distress, whose origins lie in long-term neglect of agriculture particularly after 1991, intensified greatly over the last few years because of adverse impact of a series of decisions taken by the NDA government. Government policies over the last four years show an unprecedented level of neglect towards agriculture and farmers. Having capitalised on the poor performance of the UPA-II government in addressing concerns of the farmers, the NDA government only went on to further neglect agriculture and the rural economy. Worse still, several decisions have been taken by the present government to benefit big corporates and agro-business companies at the expense of farmers. Agricultural insurance was opened to private sector and a huge largesse has been given by the government to insurance companies in the form of premium payments while farmers have got little compensation for crop losses. While corporate fraudsters have milked the pubic sector banks dry, bringing many of them to the brink of a collapse, not even peanuts have been offered to farmers reeling under debt. There are no government controls on prices of seeds, pesticides and other plant protection chemicals, and fertilisers other than urea. Agro-business companies are free to set prices of these crucial inputs, many of them patented and produced by large monopoly transnational corporations, at whatever level they like. While global oil prices have remained low for most part of the last four years, government has used it as an opportunity to mop up excise duty and fund tax breaks and largesse given to big corporates. This has meant that prices of diesel — a key agricultural input for running pumps, tractors and other machinery — have remained high, and increased more than even prices of petrol, despite the global oil prices having fallen.

Our research on agricultural tenancy in India, of which this volume is the outcome, involved a detailed assessment of the 48^th (1991-92), 59^th (2002-03) and 70^th (2012-13) rounds of the NSSO Surveys of Land and Livestock Holdings (NSSO-SLLH). This assessment included detailed household-by-household corrections to remove a number of inconsistencies in the data. The corrected data are being released for public use along with this volume.

Nurjamal Haq, a peasant from Dhubri district of Assam, has 1.3 acres of land. The total income over paid out expenses, from a whole year of work on 1.3 acres of land, was just Rs. 10,505. Nurjamal said, “with demonetisation, our lives were set on fire”. He stood in the queue at around 3 AM hoping to get some money, but was told in the evening that there was no money left. Prices of rabi crops fell sharply as traders were unwilling to buy anything. Although Nurjamal managed to sell his mustard crop, the trader held back payment for want of cash, and gave him money only two months later. With no payment from buyers of their produce, cultivators like Nurjamal were forced to buy inputs on credit. In the desperate situation that the peasants were, input dealers charged exorbitant, “whatever they wished”, prices.

Pilasaheb S. Deshmukh (PSD), a sugarcane farmer from prosperous southern Maharashtra. PSD has 7.5 acres of land irrigated by a cooperative minor lift irrigation project. PSD had problems in selling each of the three crops he harvested in 2017. While the ratoon sugarcane crop harvested in January fetched him a good return, he was unable to use any of the money for two months because of demonetisation. The soybean crop he harvested in July could not be sold because of a crash of prices. The planted crop of sugarcane that matured in October 2017 was not harvested until the end of December because of delayed operations of the sugar mill.

Keshav Lal is a potato farmer from Uttar Pradesh. Keshav Lal’s household has 0.15 acres of tubewell-irrigated land. Besides cultivating the land, Keshav also works as a construction worker. His wife, aged 48 years, works as a daily wage labourer, doing agricultural or non-agricultural work, whatever is available. A crash of potato prices in February this tear forced Keshav to abandon his crop in the field.

Udumula Balreddy is a chilli farmer from Cherial village of Siddipet district, Telangana. On account of a bumper crop of chillies in India and China, and a depressed import demand from East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, farm gate prices of chilli fell from Rs 12000 per quintal in 2016 to between 3500 to 5000 in 2017. With no support coming from the government, the crash in prices left chilli farmers like Udumula Balreddy in extreme distress. Udumula took a crop loan of Rs. 1 lakh from a bank. With losses incurred in chilly farming, he has been unable to repay even the interest on the loan.

Jagdish Patel, a middle peasant with 11 acres of very fertile, irrigated land in the upper reaches of Narmada valley, is from Pachama village in Narsinghpur district of Madhya Pradesh. Narsinghpur is the largest sugarcane producing district of Madhya Pradesh and accounts for about 65 per cent of state’s production. Despite having 11 acres of very intensively cropped land, the income from all the crops amounted to only about Rs. 4,000 per capita per month. If we account for the value of large amount of labour done by four members of the family and value other households resources that were deployed on the land, the total income from 11 acres of their land was only about Rs. 48,000. This was barely 9 per cent of the total investment in production.

Basavaraju, a deeply indebted peasant from Hassan, Karnataka. Of Basavaraju’s 7 acres land about half is tubewell irrigated on which they grow potato, ginger, tomato and chilly. When we interviewed Basavaraju in the Kisan Mukti Sansad, the household had a total outstanding debt of Rs 9.40 lakhs. Of this 6 lakhs were owed to a bank where the interest rate is about 7 per cent. About 3 lakhs had been borrowed from traders in Belur and Halebidu and from various informal lenders in the village. Most of these lenders charged an interest of 36 per cent per annum on the loan. In 2014, Basavaraju’s wife gave away her gold jewellery to obtain a gold loan from a bank in order to repay earlier high interest loans taken from local moneylenders. She has no gold left any more to pawn for a cheaper bank loan. Given the low levels of income this year again, the threat of having to sell a part of their land looms large on the family.

Ravindra Babu Dhanwa is an adivasi peasant from Palghar, Maharashtra. Ravindra Babu, belonging to the Malhar Koli tribe, is from Ambhai village in Vada Tehsil of Palghar district, Maharashtra. Most of the land they possess is undulating and rock-strewn, and only about 1.5 acres is cultivable. The land is unirrigated and single-cropped. While the family cannot make their ends meet with production on this small amount of land, food they produce on this land is crucial for their food security. They produced not only 12 quintals of paddy for self-consumption, but also a little bit of urad, tur, ragi and bajra. Adivasis like Ravindra Babu have been part of a series of agitations in Palghar to protect their land, and in turn, to protect their livelihoods and food security. This is the struggle that brought him all the way to Delhi to participate in the Kisan Mukti Sansad in November 2017.

Mahipal and Rampyari are peasants from Bidhnoi village in Bhiwani District, Haryana. Even with 10 acres of irrigated land, Mahipal and his family are unable to make their ends meet. If we look at cultivation for a whole year, Mahipal and Rampyari, even with 10 acres of irrigated land in one of the agriculturally most advanced States, got an income of only about Rs. 10,000 per acre over their paid out expenditure. If we account for the value of their own labour and other family resources, the return from land was barely Rs. 2500 per acre. While white fly infestation caused massive yield losses for this cotton farmer in Haryana, their problems were compounded by demonetisation.

Ramswarup Gopal is a cotton farmer from Fatehabad district, Haryana. For the last five years, cotton crop in Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan has suffered massive damage because of whitefly infestation. In addition, farmers in the region also have to deal with lower yields due to spurious Bt cotton seeds being sold by suppliers.

Shanti is a woman, dalit tenant farmer from Muzzafarpur district in Bihar. Shanti has a Jan Dhan bank account but she has no money to keep in it. Shanti’s family owns a small house but has no crop land of their own. For the last two years they have leased 0.17 acres of land for which they have to pay an annual rent of Rs. 3500. They cultivate paddy on this land in the kharif season and, maize and coriander in the rabi season, using a hired pumpset for irrigation. With little income from land, the household survives primarily on the wage income of Shanti and her eldest son.

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Nagaraj Thigala is a coconut and arecanut farmer from Tumkur, Karnataka. Sale of arecanut and coconut copra was disrupted for over 3 months because of demonetisation. While copra could be stored for sale later, they incurred losses since some of the arecanut was spoilt. Average prices for arecanut, ragi and ragi-hay have also been lower this year in comparison with last year. Apart from losses in farming, Nagaraj was also unable to get employment at the flower market for almost one month because of demonetisation.

Moolchand and Parvati Kol, poor peasants from Ginj in Allahabad district, were given old notes throughout the rabi season by the contractor for whom they quarry stones. An old Rs. 500 note was valued at Rs. 400 by input dealers and shopkeepers from where Moolchand bought food and other things for the family.

Binay Dineshwar Dehri, a 45 years old Mal Pahari adivasi peasant, came from Dumka district, Jharkhand to participate in the Kisan Mukti Sansad. Binay Dineshwar Dehri’s household is a semi-proletarian household with a hand-to-mouth existence. They have received no government support for improving their land, for obtaining improved inputs or getting any formal-sector credit. They depend on usurious loans from traders for cultivating the small amount of forest land that they have. With lack of access to modern inputs, technology and funds for investment, productivity is low and agriculture gives them meagre returns. Binay said, “instead of providing incomes, farming in adivasi areas makes us incur losses, which in turn forces us to take loans”.

Students from Jawaharlal Nehru University, with support from the Society for Social and Economic Research, conducted detailed interviews of 51 farmers from various States on the sidelines of the Kisan Mukti Sansad in New Delhi on November 21-22, 2017. This was done with a view to interview farmers from different parts of India. Although no formal sampling was possible, the group tried to cover farmers from different regions, farmers growing different crops, and farmers belonging to different socio-economic categories. These interviews were based on a structured survey schedule which included information on the household details, land holdings, crops cultivated, cost of production and returns from agriculture and incomes from other sources. In this series, we shall present brief profiles of selected farmers interviewed by the group.

India’s new GDP series comes with an extremely odd seasonal variation in the growth of “financial, insurance real estate and professional services”, which in turn bolstered Q2 growth.

This book raises some compelling questions that scholars working on the issue of land grab need to grapple with. For far too long, the land grab literature has used varied definitions of the term land grab and presented empirical estimates without specifying a consistent methodological framework for assessment of the extent of land grab. Do all land transactions – irrespective of whether domestic or transnational, irrespective of the class position of the sellers and buyers, irrespective of the role of state in facilitating the transactions, and irrespective of the land use before and after land transaction – constitute land grab? Brautigam has used data compiled through painstaking fieldwork to show that some of the widely used estimates of Chinese investments in land acquisition in Africa are misleading. Does this problem go beyond the estimates of Chinese land acquisitions and extend to global estimates of land grab?

India’s livestock economy is among the biggest in the world. Restrictions being sought to be imposed on cattle trade and slaughter, and the terror unleashed by the cow vigilantes, would deal a serious blow to the agrarian economy that is already reeling under a crisis precipitated by two years of drought, falling farm harvest prices and the demand deflation caused by demonetisation. While Supreme Court’s recent order staying the implementation of the recently-imposed restrictions on cattle sales is a welcome relief, the killer gau-rakshak gangs continue to roam the streets unrestrained.

This very interesting paper by Meghana Eswar and Bejoy K Thomas in Economic and Political Weekly reports on some important discrepancies in the census data on access of households to water for domestic use. There are three main findings.

Analysing household level data from three consecutive All India Debt and Investment Surveys (AIDIS) covering a period of two decades (1991-92 to 2012-13), this study finds that inequality in asset ownership in India has risen during this period. While inequality has risen in both rural and urban India, urban inequality is much higher, and the pace towards higher inequality is much faster in urban than in rural India. The growing inequality, in both rural and urban India, was mostly driven by highly unequal holding of land and buildings, the two most important forms in which Indian households hold their wealth. In terms of asset accumulation, there was no improvement for socially marginalised groups (Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim) relative to others (non-Dalit, non-Adivasi and non-Muslim), as others continued to own, on an average, more than double the assets of Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim households during the entire two decades. Non-Dalit, non-Adivasi and non-Muslim households remain a highly heterogeneous group, with much higher within group inequality than the marginalised groups.

This paper presents a study of the impact of land acquisition and displacement on the livelihoods of people in Belgaria, a village in Dhanbad district in Jharkhand. The study village, Belgaria, is on the margins of the coal mines in Jharia. Agricultural land acquired from the village in 1982 was used to construct a township and rehabilitate about 1200 families displaced by underground fires and land subsidence in Jharia. Using this village as a case study, this paper shows that, in a location with considerable degree of differentiation in ownership of land, the impact of land acquisition on livelihoods of people can vary across households belonging to different classes. Evidence from the new Belgaria township, where families displaced by underground fires were rehabilitated, shows that the resilience with which displaced workers coped with the disruption in access to livelihoods varied across male and female workers, and across socio-economic status of displaced households. Livelihoods of workers who were engaged in casual labour in the coal fields, in particular women workers, were most adversely affected due to displacement.

FAO India and the Society for Social and Economic Research organised a day-long workshop on “Measurement of Undernourishment and Food Insecurity” in New Delhi on March 15, 2016. The workshop was attended by senior officials from the National Statistical Commission (including the Central Statistical Office and the National Sample Survey Organisation), various Ministries of the Government, as well as members of the academia and civil society.

Privatisation of coal mining in Amrapara block of Pakur district by the NDA and UPA governments has facilitated a loot of national resources by a private company and deprived poor adivasi peasants of benefits from resources that rightfully belong to them. Mineral resources cannot be mined without the consent of adivasis, without fully compensating them, and without ensuring that a reasonable share of benefits from the use of this wealth goes back to them. This is the fundamental principle on which policies related to coal and other minerals have to be based.

This paper is a contribution towards understanding reasons behind declining female employment in India as indicated by recent rounds of large-sample Employment and Unemployment Surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey (NSS) Organisation.

Here is a very interesting paper. Arjun Kumar\cite{arjun_sanitation_2014} shows that, according to official reports, 78.27 million individual household latrines were constructed under the Total Sanitation Campaign (renamed as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012) between 2001-02 and 2010-11. However, according to the Census of India, over the same period, number of households having latrine within premises increased by only 21.2 million.

This report puts together a large compendium of data on under-development of adivasis in contemporary India. Undoubtedly a critical reference for anyone interested in the subject.

Rather unusual for TV shows in India, here was a rather serious discussion on statistical issues. In this interview on CNBC, Latha Venkatesh talks to TCA Anant, Chief Statistician, and Pranob Sen, Chairman, National Statistical Commission, about the quality of India’s macro-economic data.

The NSSO/Labour Bureau series “Wage Rates in Rural India” is compiled by the NSSO and the Labour Bureau, Shimla. NSSO compiles these data and publishes them in “Prices and Wages in Rural India (New Series)”. Labour Bureau publishes the same data in the Indian Labour Journal and separately in a publication called the “Wage Rates in Rural India”.

Yoshifumi Usami has very kindly contributed district-level data from “Agricultural Wages in India” for 1973-74 to 1994-95. He has computerised month-by-month data for selected occupations for all the districts.

This guide presents a toolkit for writing research papers and monographs using Emacs, Org-mode and R.

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 promises free and compulsory education to all children in the age group of 6-14 years. But the way this critical entitlement is being implemented leaves much to be desired. Apart from there being glaring gaps in the provisions of the Act, its implementation challenges have plagued the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the programme that is aimed at ushering in quality elementary education for all. The problems are many, and this paper observes that most of them can be connected to inadequate funds. It concludes that the best way of ensuring that the Act’s aims are fulfilled is to bring in a common school system based on neighbourhood schools that replaces the bewildering variety of indifferent institutions we now have.

This note points to a new problem in the methodology of classification of rural labour households, which was revised as part of the 68th round of NSSO. This problem has arisen on account of changes in the method that is used to convert the information on income shares into a scheme for classification of households. Instead of correcting the way agricultural labour households and rural labour households were identified prior to the 68th round, NSSO has created new categories of households that are not only incomparable with the categories of agricultural labour households and rural labour households in earlier surveys, but have serious conceptual problems.

Broadly speaking, eight salient points emerge from the secondary data on rural Adivasi households, which include various survey rounds of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) including the 66th Round (2009–10), 68th Round (2011–12) and 69th Round (2012), the Censuses of India, and other sources of official data.

This study deals with a new statistical domain, that of the village (or gram) panchayat. This domain has emerged in rural India as a consequence of the decentralisation programme initiated by the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution. The work of the Expert Committee on Basic Statistics for Local-Level Development represents a landmark in this regard because it sheds light on the potential of village-level data sources for the new era of democratic decentralisation in India. This paper examines data sources at the gram panchayat level in relation to the needs that are generated if the Constitution (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992 is implemented comprehensively. From this point of view, the paper identifies three categories of data needs. These are: data required for self-governance, of which data required for managing the transition to full-scope constitutional devolution are a special component (Data Needs I and Ia); data required for matters of public finance (Data Needs II); and data required for micro-level planning (and plan implementation) for economic development and social justice (Data Needs III).

Sheila Bhalla in Economic and Political Weekly:

“The working-age population of India is growing in size, the labour force is shifting away from agriculture and, with higher education, workers are also seeking better-quality non-agricultural jobs. However, the trends between 2004-05 and 2011-12 indicate that employment generation in the country has been inadequate to meet this challenge. Construction has virtually become the only source of incremental employment in rural India. In the urban areas, men have been able to obtain a disproportionate share of high-productivity employment.”

This new report from UNDP “revisits the theoretical concepts of inequalities including their measurements, analyzes their global trends, presents the policy makers’ perception of inequalities in 15 countries and identifies various policy options in combating this major development challenge of our time.

This paper analyses National Sample survey data on changes in the distribution of operational holdings of land, using data from NSS surveys on employment and unemployment. The paper discusses the limitations of these statistics in some detail. Four main points emerge from the analysis: there has been a sharp rise in landlessness in rural India; caste disparities in access to land have persisted over time; there has been a rise in inequality in distribution of land cultivated by households; and there has been a decline in the proportion of manual labour households that combined wage labour with cultivation of small holdings. Finally, statistics on land distribution at the State level reveal some puzzling features – some of which point to possible errors in data collection.

“The eight millennium development goals, which set out to free people from extreme poverty and multiple deprivations worldwide, expire in 2015. What progress has been made? What needs to happen next?”

The Bali ministerial conference in December presents a crucial opportunity to bring about changes in WTO rules, by which developing countries can support small farmers and move towards eliminating hunger.

“The growth of gross domestic product in every sub-sector of the Indian economy accelerated during the second half of the 2000s, compared to the first half of the decade. However, employment growth in most sectors except construction decelerated. This jobless growth was partly the result of positive changes such as the reduction of ”distress employment“ in agriculture, created during the previous half-decade, and an expansion in the population of students. Rural wages rose and average educational levels of the workforce improved. Government interventions in rural India since the mid-2000s, particularly the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, seemed to have aided these positive transformations. However, manufacturing employment in the country fell and employment growth slowed down in most constituents of the services sector. The new jobs generated were predominantly in rural construction. The slow progress in the diversification of India’s employment structure has led to large-scale withdrawal of women from the labour force, with the number of women thus ”missing“ being as large as the population of Brazil.”

The Making Data Meaningful guides published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe are intended as a practical tool to help managers, statisticians and media relations officers in statistical organizations use text, tables, charts, maps and other devices to bring statistics to life for non-statisticians.