Stranded Workers Action Network News Today

This paper examines the importance of skills, especially through vocational training, for the rural non-farm sector in overcoming the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The difference-in-differences technique has been used to assess the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the earnings of skilled and unskilled self-employed activities. The primary data

They are now alone in the world, hungry, jobless and with zero bargaining power and protection – and the employers know that.

While 60 percent Indian women are anaemic as they eat last and the least, rising hunger hits the marginalised most.

Migrant labourer Raja Kumar’s lockdown-induced miseries in successive years may have been less acute if the country’s governments had not sat on a 42-year-old legal provision that the Centre is now set to implement under a Supreme Court nod. Kumar, 25, who worked in Noida for a paltry Rs 225 a day, had to return home to Sameswari village in Bihar’s Banka district in April when work became unavailable amid the second wave of Covid. But the labour contractor who engages him did not give him...

Guna Nayak, a migrant labourer in Delhi, says he will never forget the month of May when he and his wife often had to skip dinner. With the city in lockdown then, Nayak was confined to his one-room lodgings in Kotla Mubarakpur. He had no ration card entitling him to subsidised food. Advertisement Nor, fearful of catching Covid, would he join the free-meal queues at the Delhi government’s distribution centres. “We had limited rations and no money. Whoever I called for help had similar proble...

A civil society group has demanded an extra 50 days’ work per person under the rural job guarantee scheme over and above the provision of up to 100 days’ work per family every year. Under the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha’s proposal, communicated in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a family with one job card holder will be entitled to 150 days’ work while one with two will get 200 days’ work and so on. Advertisement The Morcha has sought the relief only for financial year 2021-22, c...

The Railway Board shared the data on the deaths that occurred between January and December 2020.

As India reported a record number of coronavirus cases and deaths, the migrant crisis continued.

Sudhir Paswan, 29, is back to square one--in his village in Bihars Muzaffarpur district, counting his losses. It has been more than a week since he returned, after failing to secure a job in Delhi. A labourer who loaded and unloaded goods in Delhis Okhla Industrial Area, he would earn between Rs 200 and Rs 700 a day. "Since the lockdown, there was no work and access to food and essentials became difficult. I had to leave the city," he said. Over 800,000 migrants left Indias capital, for instan...

There is an urgent need to strengthen the public distribution system and the MGNREGS