Employment

The lack of opportunities for training and quality education hinders the development of entrepreneurial talent among India and South Asia’s youth. In this way, they are demoralised and disillusioned with the system and more often than not, with themselves. Some of them believe they are useless, while others do “nothing” and therefore amount to “nothing.” Hope and agency can provide an out for these young people all across India and South Asia.

Drawing on long-term multisite ethnographic fieldwork in Allahabad and Meerut, this article examines how educated unemployed young men, from different socio-economic backgrounds, struggle for employment and engage with politics and religion in the age of neo-liberalism.

A multi-crore effluent treatment plant being set up at Travancore Titanium, one of the most successful public sector undertakings in Kerala, may well push the company into the red. Workers are demanding a more cost-effective project, while the local population appears to be unconcerned with the financial impact of such a plant on the company.

Generally, the fiscal implications of social protection programmes are evaluated, but not so much on the economic impacts these schemes have on macro aggregates such as output, employment, income and revenue. This motivated us to evaluate the economic impact of three major social protection programmes, namely, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Indira Awaas Yojana, and the National Social Assistance Programme in 2011-12 using a social accounting matrix. It is found that these programmes have significant impacts on output across different sectors of the economy, on income generation and distribution of different household classes in urban and rural areas, on employment across different sectors of the economy, and even on government revenue generation.