India needs an Employment Guarantee Scheme

.Poverty, Employment, India

Basic Social Services for All? Ensuring Accountability Through

human development, democracy

A Capability centred approach to environmental sustainability: Is productive employment the missing link between micro-and macro polices?

The emphasis on growth has led to an under-emphasis of the micro-impacts of macro-economic policies. Whether growth reduces income-poverty is crucially dependent on its impact on employment. This paper addresses the question: what kind of productive employment can an economy generate that fulfils three objectives: one, personal fulfilment; two, value added; and three, restores the organic link between humans and nature. Growth policies that do not fulfil these criteria fail the test for human capability enhancement with environmental sustainability. Policies which recognize a dual synergy framework like the paper proposes, and which have been demonstrated to fulfil these objectives are described and discussed for specific countries/sectors. A paper for a book: Sustainable Human Development and the Capability Approach, to be edited by Enrica Chiappero Martinetti (Department of Economics, University of Pavia, Italy) & Anantha K. Duraiappah (International Institute for Sustainable Development, Canada).Poverty, macro polices

La nécessité d?un plan de garantie de l?emploi en Inde

La nécessité d?un plan de garantie de l?emploi en Inde

India Necesita un Plan de Garantía de Empleo

India Necesita un Plan de Garantía de Empleo

A Índia Precisa de um Sistema de Garantia de Emprego

A Índia Precisa de um Sistema de Garantia de Emprego

The Private Sector and Privatization in Social Services: Is the Washington Consensus 'Dead'?

One of the most significant developments in the 1990s in social policy in developing and transition countries has been the growth of privatization in health, education and water services – three basic services, which involve most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Welfare pluralism was very much a core element of the Washington Consensus. Despite the talk of the Washington Consensus being 'dead for years', the international financial institutions have pushed for welfare pluralism in social services since the 1990s. This article critically scrutinizes the arguments and evidence that have been made in favour of greater private sector participation in these services. The article addresses what role the private sector could or should play in these services and is, thus, driven by practical policy concerns. For reasons of space, this article does not address the non-profit or nongovernmental organization (NGO) provision of basic social services (which, in most countries, is quite small in size)

Building a social security architecture for informal workers in India, finally!

Social protection and social security have very limited coverage in India. This reality has not changed since independence, one of greatest failures of the development strategy India adopted in the early fifties. The labour force is predominantly unorganized. As much as 91 per cent of the labour force are in informal employment, i.e. without any social insurance we estimated from the NSO’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (2017-18) (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019). This is barely down 2 percentage points from 93% in 2011-12 (NSO’s 68th Round). In fact, regardless of the growth rate of GDP, this high share of informality in the workforce had not changed until 2012, and when it fell recently, it did so by merely 2 points. The rest 9 per cent of the workforce has varying levels of social security in the form of provident fund, paid leave, medical insurance and other benefit