Arindam Das, Senior Program Manager at the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, presented a seminar on Wage rates in Rural India, at the office of the Foundation on March 2, 2018. The presentation was based on a research paper titled “Wage Rates in Rural India, 1998–99 to 2016–17,” jointly written by him and Prof. Yoshifumi Usami (Research Fellow, University of Tokyo).

Arindam began his presentation by briefly discussing the three main data sources pertaining to wage rates in India, and went on to elaborate upon the database — Wage Rates in Rural India (WRRI) — that he has used for his research.

The paper looks at the trend of rural wage rates in the last two decades to conclude that 1998-99 to 2006-07 was a period of stagnation, which was followed by a period of rapid growth in wage rates till 2014-15. There was an apparent decline in the wage rates in 2015-16, recovering marginally in 2016-17. The presentation did not venture into the possible causes for these fluctuating trends, a matter that, Arindam feels, needs further investigation.