-The Hindu Statement comes after it recently argued against disclosing info related to committee The Centre has denied the very existence of a committee set up to oversee medical oxygen supply during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The statement comes just two weeks after it argued strenuously before the Central Information Commission (CIC) against disclosing information about this committee on the grounds of strategic interests, commercial confidences, intellectual property and Cabinet papers. Last week,...

-The Hindu West Bengal has effectively used the vaccines supplied by the Centre, economist says West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday met Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and discussed India’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic with him. Mr. Banerjee, who is a member of West Bengal’s COVID-19 management committee, said that his sense is that the biggest problem is that the Centre is not capable of generating the supply of vaccines...

-The Hindu In the absence of CES data, the Periodic Labour Force Survey shows a rise in the absolute number of the poor India has not released its Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) data since 2011-12. Normally a CES is conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSO) every five years. But the CES of 2017-18 (already conducted a year late) was not made public by the Government of India. Now, we hear...

-The Hindu Business Line As our governments think and rethink lockdown measures and scheme policy interventions, it is time we, as a society collective, pay attention to our children on the brink of irreversible damage What does it mean to lose one’s childhood to unsung labour? What is it like when books are replaced by bricks, playgrounds by agricultural fields, plastic toys with heavy-metal machines, alphabet recitations by silent cries of help?...

-The Hindu Business Line Number of placements under the flagship PMKVY scheme plunged during 2020-21 There’s a drastic decline in the number of unemployed youth getting placements under the short-term training programme of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) scheme during the Covid-19 pandemic. Launched in 2015, the PMKVY is among the flagship programmes of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship that aim to mobilise and train youth according to the...