R K Hebsur has contributed immensely to strengthen the philosophical and methodological foundations of social science research in India. Despite spending considerable time teaching as a college lecturer, he made an imprint in the fi eld of research methodology. Hebsur worked hard to synthesise different disciplinary perspectives to explain a social phenomenon in its entirety. As a head of the Department of Research Methodology at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, he established a multidisciplinary research tradition. Though he had a short stint in the university system, the generations to come will remember and admire his life and work.
The unemployment rate in the country increased sharply to 6.1%, as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017–18 data, from 2.2%, based on the National Sample Survey, 68th round, 2011–12. A few have raised questions regarding methodological differences, mainly concerning the second-stage household sample stratification procedure not adopted in proportion to the respective population share. In the PLFS, this stratification is based on the number of matriculates per household and, in the NSS 68th round, on the level of per capita expenditure. It is found that the results obtained in each of these data sets are robust for the strata on the basis of which the surveys were conducted, respectively, and hence, both are reliable and comparable.
Researchers and academia seldom think about the foot soldiers who collect data by travelling to villages, blocks, or districts and interviewing households and communities.
Since independence the government has striven to adopt wage fixation policies with regard to public sector organised labour. Initially the role was discharged by the judiciary and a while later by a tripartite machinery - the wage boards. However, the setting up of the Bureau of Public Enterprises in the early 1960s signalled a shift to greater centralisation. Despite the bureau's existence as a 'supra-bureaucracy', its attempts to impose wage standardisation and salary restraints, but for a brief period during the emergency years, proved by and large ineffectual.
