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Pratyaya Amrit to be next chief secy of Bihar

Pratyaya Amrit to be next chief secy of Bihar

Time of India9 hours ago
Patna: Development commissioner and 1991-batch IAS officer, Pratyaya Amrit, will be the next chief secretary of Bihar. Amrit will take over the charge from Sept 1 after the retirement of the present chief secretary, Amrit Lal Meena.
A notification in this regard was issued by the general administration department (GAD) on Monday evening.
It stated that the present chief secretary, Meena, will retire on Aug 31, and Amrit will take over as the chief secretary from Sept 1 this year. The notification, signed by the additional chief secretary of the GAD, B Rajendra, also mentioned that before taking over as the chief secretary of Bihar from Sept 1, Amrit will hold the additional charge of officer on special duty in the chief secretary's office.
Presently, apart from holding the charge of the state's development commissioner, Amrit is also holding the additional charge of additional chief secretary of the health and disaster management departments.
Amrit, who is a native of Gopalganj district, has always been considered the first option by the govt for any department that needed revamping. He is credited with improving the condition of electricity and wide road network in the state.
Amrit was brought to the health department at a time when the state, like the rest of the country, was fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Australia lifts foreign student cap to 295,000 and prioritises Southeast Asia
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Every month's jobs data is revised in the following two months. Trump also repeated a largely inaccurate attack from the campaign about an annual revision last August, which reduced total employment in the United States by 818,000, or about 0.5%. The government also revises employment figures every year. Trump charged the annual revision was released before the 2024 presidential election to "boost" Vice President Kamala Harris's "chances of Victory," yet it was two months before the election and widely reported at the time that the revision lowered hiring during the Biden-Harris administration and pointed to a weaker economy. Here's why the government revises the data The monthly revisions occur because many companies that respond to the government's surveys send their data in late, or correct the figures they've already submitted. The proportion of companies sending in their data later has risen in the past decade. Every year, the BLS does an additional revision based on actual job counts that are derived from state unemployment insurance records. Those figures cover 95% of U.S. businesses and aren't derived from a survey but are not available in real time. These are the factors that cause revisions Figuring out how many new jobs have been added or lost each month is more complicated than it may sound. For example, if one person takes a second job, should you focus on the number of jobs, which has increased, or the number of employed people, which hasn't? (The government measures both: The unemployment rate is based on how many people either have or don't have jobs, while the number of jobs added or lost is counted separately). Each month, the government surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies at over 630,000 locations - including multiple locations for the same business - covering about one-third of all workers. 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As a result, most of the job gains or losses each month are probably occurring at new companies, or those going out of business. And those are the ones the government uses models to estimate, which can make them more volatile. Groshen also points out that since the pandemic there has been a surge of new start-up companies, after many Americans lost their jobs or sought more independence. Yet they may not have created as many jobs as startups did pre-COVID, which throws off the government's models. Revisions seem to be getting bigger The revisions to May and June's job totals, which reduced hiring by a total of 258,000, were the largest - outside recessions - since 1967, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. Kevin Hassett, Trump's top economic adviser, went on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday and said, "What we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers." Hassett blamed a sharp drop in response rates to the government's surveys during and after the pandemic: "When COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed." Yet calculations by Tedeschi show that while revisions spiked after the pandemic, they have since declined and are much smaller than in the 1960s and 1970s. Other concerns about the government's data Many economists and statisticians have sounded the alarm about things like declining response rates for years. A decade ago, about 60% of companies surveyed by BLS responded. Now, only about 40% do. The decline has been an international phenomenon, particularly since COVID. The United Kingdom has even suspended publication of an official unemployment rate because of falling responses. And earlier this year the BLS said that it was cutting back on its collection of inflation data because of the Trump administration's hiring freeze, raising concerns about the robustness of price data just as economists are trying to gauge the impact of tariffs on inflation. U.S. government statistical agencies have seen an inflation-adjusted 16% drop in funding since 2009, according to a July report from the American Statistical Association. "We are at an inflection point," the report said. "To meet current and future challenges requires thoughtful, well-planned investment ... In contrast, what we have observed is uncoordinated and unplanned reductions with no visible plan for the future.

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