Analysis of women's employment and decent work in the context of the global economic crisis shows that gender sensitive policy responses are more likely to be successful.

The official assessment about India making progress in addressing hunger, nutrition and poverty over last two decades, do not match the ground realities.

With cheap labour and a strong supply base, India's automobile sector has emerged successful in integrating itself into the global production networks. Using case studies from the National Capital Region, this paper seeks to study the nature of changes in the organisation of production and work in the automobile sector - both intra-firm and inter-firm - and their impact on the changing labour processes and issues of managerial control, skill or working conditions. The anatomy of the recent waves of labour unrest there has been studied to investigate its relation with changing labour processes, and to understand the new regime of accumulation from a political economy perspective in terms of the dynamic interaction of capital's strategy, technology and the agency of labour.

This discussion note is an attempt to situate the development of Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) as a legal tax entity recognised by tax law, separate and distinct from individuals and corporate entities. Over the years this tool has been used by the family-owned business groups for evading tax. In fact in the era of neoliberal globalisation, the laws of the land have been altered suitably to facilitate the transformation of family-owned business groups into multinationals without an increase in their total corporate liability.

Labour Market Regulations and Economic Outcomes: Some capital lessons and minor messages

Report on the State of Food Insecurity in Urban India

India's New High Growth Trajectory: Implications for demand, technology and employment

The Challenge of Ensuring Full Employment in the Twenty-first Century

India's Role in the New Global Farmland Grab

Food Prices, Health and Nutrition: Red-flag indicators for the 12th Plan

Industrialising India's Food Flows: An analysis of the food waste argument

Hunger: The true growth story in India

Shrinking Cereals, Growing Food Parks

The Public and the Private

Indian Labour Market Report 2008

The Impact of Macroeconomic Change on Employment in the Retail Sector in India: Policy Implications for Growth, Sectoral Change and Employment

Given the very large number of suicides by farmers in various parts of India over the last decade, there is a need to probe the issue by utilizing a data source which would provide a comprehensive, nation-wide picture. This paper is a modest attempt to fill that gap. Its basic objective is to put together, and carry out a preliminary analysis on, the secondary data that are available on farmers' suicides in the country. The paper studies, first, the magnitude and trends in farmers' suicides in India over 1997-2006; and second, the regional patterns, if any, in the incidence and trends in these suicides.

Given that a substantial proportion of companies in Asian developing countries are either unlisted or have a small proportion of free-floating shares, the surge in investments by private equity firms suggests that foreign acquisitions could increase in the region sharply. With foreign investors controlling a rising share of total assets, the ability of domestic forces and the domestic State to influence the pattern and pace of growth of domestic economic activity would be substantially eroded.

In recent years, the 'official' India has been patting itself on account of accelerated economic growth rates and the presumed progress in poverty reduction. However, as this paper argues, the recent economic growth has been extremely lopsided; more than ever before. Further, large sections of the country's population continue to suffer, very acutely, with reference to a whole range of development deficits. This paper is an attempt to sketch a snapshot of India's economic growth performance, along with some of the major development deficits it is facing.

The consequence of recent structural shifts is that the Indian economy can record the observed creditable rates of non-inflationary growth of aggregate GDP even when its agricultural sector languishes. It appears that a feature of the growth process in a more open and liberalised environment is that the peasantry has a much smaller a role in sustaining economic growth and can thus be partially excluded from development. What is disconcerting is that the self-correcting mechanism that existed in the earlier period to restore a semblance of balance between agricultural and non-agricultural growth are no more operative.

This paper provides a simple model of the current pattern of India's economic growth process, to reckon with the fact that even an accelerating growth rate may leave the unemployment problem completely unresolved, or even accentuated, as labour productivity rises at a faster rate than investment. An obvious conclusion that emerges is that the widely-held perception that higher and higher growth rates would eventually eradicate unemployment in the country, is untenable.

This paper argues that both China and India, despite the similarity of the current international hype about their future economic prospects and also despite their obvious differences, face rather similar economic problems at present with respect to the labour market. In both countries, the strategy of development is delivering relatively high growth without commensurate increases in employment, especially in the organised sector; and the bulk of new employment is in lower productivity activities under uncertain and often oppressive conditions. It is argued that this paradox may be a common result of the similar strategy of economic expansion currently being followed in both countries.

The tremendous economic pressure that the Indian countryside has come under in the recent years is bound to impact the well-being of the masses in the rural economy. This paper is an attempt to examine the key elements of the contemporary agrarian crisis and its possible consequences for agricultural labourers. It appears that their economic conditions, in any case quite fragile and vulnerable even in 'better' times, have taken quite a battering in the recent years.

This paper explores why the official poverty estimates show low levels as well as decline in poverty in India over the 1990s, whereas all other economic and social indicators suggest that absolute poverty is high. The former do not capture the true picture because the official method involves the 'fallacy of equivocation'. It is also argued that when actual rural poverty is as high as nearly four-fifths of the population and poverty depth is increasing with a higher proportion of people being pushed down into lower nutritional status, there is an urgent need to revert to a demand-driven universal public distribution system.