-TheWire.in As one village prepares to take the government to court, another claims panchayat land reserved for scheduled castes was auctioned by proxy to ‘upper caste’ families. Chandigarh: One-and-a-half months ago, Amrik Kaur, sarpanch of village Sekhowal in Ludhiana district, was asked to attend a meeting at the Ludhiana deputy commissioner’s office. There, she was asked to give her consent for the transfer of a portion of the village common (shamlat) land...

-Hindustan Times They own many educational institutions. To preserve their patronage network, they will resist reforms The New Education Policy (NEP) presented by the government recently is being described as a progressive and forward-looking document. There is little to quibble with the broad recommendations in the document. The deeper question to pose is WHOse interests the reform is going to hurt, and whether this class has enough power to circumvent the reform...

-Newsclick.in The dearth of capital will make a return to normalcy difficult for ostagars even when there will be a visible improvement and the authorities muster courage to lift all the restrictions. Kolkata: “We are passing through the worst phase in our 17 years old enterprise BabyGarments.in and we have no clue when we will see the first signs of revival”. This is how a middle-aged woman entrepreneur and proprietor of BabyGarments,...

-The Indian Express It has helped mitigate increased rural distress due to Covid. Now, focus on getting people back to normal work The MGNREGA has created 153.16 crore person-days of employment during April-July. Not only is this way higher than the 107.24 person-days for the corresponding four months of last fiscal, but also significant compared to the 267.96 crore and 265.35 crore person-days generated in the WHOle of 2018-19 and 2019-20, respectively....

-TheWire.in A recent survey conducted becomes invaluable in terms of data on the socio-economic backgrounds of seasonal and short-term migrants. The lack of a comprehensive database on India’s migrants has been one of the foremost hurdles preventing the Indian government from providing direct cash transfers to them. The most that the government has been able to say about migrants is their aggregate number. Indeed, one of the biggest non-medical tragedies of the COVID-19...