-The Hindu Without regulation, the situation could spiral out of control Recently, a professor at a business school allegedly misused his faculty position to provide fake certificates to students whom he had compelled to attend an online course that he taught. He essentially took advantage of India’s rising pre-pandemic gig economy in education. When authorities at the institution discovered the racket, they suspended him. This is a cautionary tale for the global...

-The Indian Express Traditional redistribution, which aims to deliver on intangibles like health and education, has ceded to a distinctive ‘New Welfarism’, where Centre is demonstrably providing tangible essentials to citizens The recently released fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) provides reliable and independent evidence to assess micro-development performance under this government. The survey covers many dimensions of health, nutrition, and the overall quality of lives. Here we focus...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

  Among other things, one of the reasons (given by some economists) behind low labour force participation rate (LFPR) of women vis-à-vis men in the country is that more young girls are educating themselves, causing an improvement in the secondary and tertiary enrolment rates. It means that more Indian women are staying out of the labour force in order to continue their education – secondary education and / or college &...

-The Hindu India is ignoring the necessity for strong capacity building of the many NGOs engaged in educational improvement For about three decades now, a large number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are intensively engaged in the task of improving elementary education in the country. A paper in the Economic & Political Weekly of May 2005, titled How Large Is India’s Non-Profit Sector?, estimates about three million paid workers in the voluntary sector...