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New Delhi: A key failure of the Modi government’s tenure so far has been a very weak growth in rural wages averaging at 5% annually, barely beating inflation. Recent years have also been marked by a massive reverse migration to rural areas in the years after Covid , worsening the rural employment and wage growth situation. There is consensus among economists about stagnant rural incomes.

However, by some magical trick the Labour Bureau seems to have conjured new data to show a big surge of 17% in the rural wages growth, as per Dhananjay Sinha, chief executive officer (CEO) and head of research, Systematix Institutional Equities.

Wading through government data on rural wages, Sinha came across this strange anomaly – India’s rural wages growth showed an unusual jump after July 2025.

Where was this big structural break upward coming from? After digging further into the data and speaking to economists in the Labour Bureau of........

© The Wire