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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 a transport allowance. Advertisement “I had to borrow money to go home,” Kumar said.

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 problems. My wife and I had to skip dinner some days,” Nayak said. Nayak, who is from Kendrapada distric...