-Hindustan Times The ₹12,000 crore Char Dham road project was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016 to connect Hindu shrines of Gangotri, Yamnotri, Badrinath and Kedarnth through a four lane all-weather road The all-weather Char Dham road in Uttarakhand has witnessed 25 major landslides this rainy season, forcing the administration to close two stretches of roads in Tehri Garwhal for indefinite periods and indicating that “unscientific” road construction was causing...
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NREGA is crucial to rural India in 2021 -Avani Kapur, Harish Damodaran and Yamini Aiyar
-IDROnline.org While it claims to be a demand-based scheme with an elastic budget, NREGA’s failure to support the rural economy in 2021 indicates otherwise. A comparison of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) demand and supply of work between the first quarter of financial year (FY) 2020, when the national lockdown was in place and the first quarter of FY 2021 when the second wave was at its peak offers...
More »Ambiguous definition means oil-palm plantations will count as forest cover -Jayashree Nandi
-Hindustan Times The Forest Survey of India defines forest cover thus: “All lands, more than 1 ha in area with a tree canopy density of 10% irrespective of ownership and legal status. The National Mission on Edible Oils- Oil Palm (NMEO-OP), approved by the Union Cabinet last week, will increase the area under oil palm cultivation by an additional area of 6.5 lakh hectare (ha) by 2025-26, bringing a total area of...
More »Food delivery workers tell their story on Twitter, say it's a losing game
-TheNewsMinute.com The delivery executives behind the anonymous Twitter handle tell TNM that they deliver more food, travel more but earn less than ever before. Throughout the pandemic, even as restaurants were shuttered to diners and grocery stores closed early, food delivery executives have remained a constant, traversing cities at all hours of the day to bring meals to your doorstep. Yet, during this time, many of these executives have stood in protest...
More »Reclaiming democracy via voters’ whip -Yogendra Yadav
-The Tribune Right from the inception of parliamentary democracy in our country, every party has appointed a whip tasked with disciplining the elected representatives. But what about direct command from the voters? Why can’t the voters bypass the parties and instruct their representatives on how to conduct themselves in Parliament? THE Samyukt Kisan Morcha’s decision to issue a ‘voters’ whip’ is one more democratic innovation in these dark times when formal democratic...
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