Sources archived for The lost middle
Every document opened from the web for the paper’s references, archived at
gs://avantifellows-research-sources/plfs/pathways/whitepaper/, and each file name below links to its copy.
Anyone signed in with an avantifellows.org Google account can open them; nobody outside Avanti can. (The
original archive is gs://avantifellows-external-data/reference-papers/plfs-pathways/; all 38 files were
copied from it on 30 September 2026 and each still matches the SHA-256 below.)
Key = the {{key}} marker in whitepaper_source.md. The archived copy is what the paper was checked
against; the source URL is where it was fetched from on the date shown and may rot. HTML snapshots are
the page as served to curl -4 -A Mozilla/5.0; .md text-captures are verbatim fetcher output where the
site blocked curl. Third-party documents are archived for verification; copyright stays with their
publishers.
Costings built from published rates, not measured
Section titled “Costings built from published rates, not measured”costs is a costing, so two of its inputs are rules rather than observations and are named here so
anyone can vary them: House Rent Allowance at 30/20/10% of basic for X/Y/Z cities (the 7th Pay
Commission slab in force since dearness allowance passed 50%), and the employer’s National Pension
System share at 14% of basic plus dearness allowance (Gazette, 2019). Both are standard and neither
was opened as a document here; the basic pay and the dearness-allowance rate underneath them were.
Not obtainable
Section titled “Not obtainable”- The committee’s Seventeenth Report (Demands for Grants 2026-27, Ministry of Skill Development and
Entrepreneurship, March 2026), the primary source for PMKVY 4.0’s 14% budget utilisation. Every route
into the Parliament estate failed on 14 and 15 September 2026:
sansad.in/getFilereturns HTTP 500 for every report numbered 15 and above while 1 to 14 download normally,eparlib.sansad.inrefuses the connection, and the committee’s own page onsansad.inreturns 500. This is an outage, not a bad citation. The 14% is cited to Careers360’s report of the document, archived above; re-try the primary when the file server recovers. - The Lokniti-CSDS-KAS youth study released 26 July 2023 (Indian Youth in the Post-Pandemic World, 9,316 respondents, 18 states), the source of the “three in five want a government job” figure the press carried. Neither organisation publishes the report: Lokniti hosts only the questionnaire (archived above, and headed Youth and Mental health 2022, so the fieldwork predates the release year), and every Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung document path for it returns 403. The paper therefore uses the 2016 and 2021 reports, both of which were read in full.
Superseded during the sweep
Section titled “Superseded during the sweep”Documents kept because an earlier draft cited them and the correction has to be checkable, not because
the paper still rests on them: the Azim Premji working paper (mehr, does not contain the figure
attributed to it), The Wire article (mehr, the relay), the Lokniti barometer landing page and findings
PDF (lok, the wrong document), and the Business Standard article (pmkvy, does not carry the 14%).