-TheWire.in No job contract means lower pay and longer hours. In a desperate bid to encourage investment, several states have made sweeping changes to labour laws over the past month. A number of states have extended the maximum daily work hours from nine to 12, removed the requirement to pay minimum wages, diluted safety norms, restricted the rights of workers to unionise and made it easy for employers to fire workers. While netas...

-ThePrint.in Officials claim the Unorganised Sector Workers’ Social Security Act had some flaws that hampered its implementation, but experts say successive govts slept on it. New Delhi: The thousands of migrant labourers facing a crisis amid the Covid-19 lockdown would have had a safety net if a 2008 law providing social protection to unorganised workers had been implemented. But successive governments have failed to do so. The current database with the government shows...

-The Hindu Instead of embracing the welfare state path, the BJP government is encouraging greater privatisation The novel coronavirus is a global threat, but the pandemic has had an uneven impact across countries and within countries. Historically, social inequality has always been extreme in India. However, the lockdown has sharpened the edges of inequality even further, especially because of the way it has been implemented. Many countries have imposed lockdowns but not...

-TheWire.in The increased allocation is welcome, but experts say the government should also work to solve pending liability issues and other techno-bureaucratic problems that hold back its effectiveness. New Delhi: On Sunday, while announcing the fifth and final tranche of the Centre’s COVID-19 economic relief package, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that the government will be allocating an additional Rs 40,000 crore under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). “It...

-NDTV The Madras High Court has given the centre and Tamil Nadu government till May 22 to respond to several searching questions about its handling of the crisis Chennai: The "pathetic condition of migrant labourers...is nothing but a human tragedy", the Madras High Court said today in strongly-worded comments on the humanitarian crisis sparked by lakhs of migrants frantically trying to return to home states amid the coronavirus lockdown. Pulling up both the...