-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-The Telegraph Many families depend on two entitlements for survival: social security pensions and rations from the public distribution system Particularly vulnerable tribal groups, earlier known as primitive tribal groups, are the sort of people you may never meet unless you take the trouble to look for them. In Jharkhand, they live in small hamlets scattered over the nooks and crannies of the state’s undulating forests. Without a purpose and some local...

-TheWire.in While no one can argue that India may moving in the right direction in terms of sanitation, all is not well. Despite increasing focus by the government and programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, unsafe sanitation work, loosely captured under the catch-all phrase manual scavenging, still exists in India. There are five million people employed in sanitation work of some sort in India with about two million of them working...

-The Hindu A national policy for internal migration is needed to improve earnings and enable an exit from poverty Though migration is expected to enhance consumption and lift families out of absolute poverty at the origin, it is not free from distress — distress due to unemployment or underemployment in agriculture, natural calamities, and input/output market imperfections. Internal migration can be driven by push and/or pull factors. In India, over the recent...

-Networkideas.org In recent times, the clamour for formalising economic activity, or shrinking its unorganised component and expanding the organised, has been heard from diverse sources. There are those who want formalisation to occur because the unorganised sector is seen as being largely outside the direct and indirect tax net, depriving the government of much needed resources. Hence, for example, one feature seen as favouring the Goods and Services Tax regime is...