-TheWire.in Improved data collection and reporting, appropriate protective gear and better government policies can all help address the problems of sanitation workers. Over the last seven or eight years in India, sanitation has been a key focus of government programmes. Several thousand crores have been spent on the issue and there has been remarkable progress in terms of toilets constructed. The sanitation problem has also received ample attention in the development sector,...

-The Hindu 40% belong to SC/ST communities; 88% of IIT Guwahati dropouts, 76% of IIT Delhi from reserved categories. Almost 63% of the undergraduate dropouts at the top seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) over the last five years are from the reserved categories, according to Education Ministry data given in response to a question in the Rajya Sabha today. Almost 40% were from the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. In...

-The Hindu The case for reservations for women and transgender persons in State jobs and higher education The Bihar government recently announced 33% horizontal reservation for women in State engineering and medical colleges. While reservation for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) is referred to as vertical reservation, horizontal reservation refers to the equal opportunity provided to other categories of beneficiaries, such as...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-Scroll.in India runs massive policy programs based on caste. Yet refuses to collect data on them. This paradox means the government is working blind. On July 20, the Modi government told Parliament that it had decided to not conduct a caste census. The only caste-wise data the next census would collate would be on Dalits and Adivasis, the same as every census in independent India’s history. India’s largest caste bloc – the...