-Hindustan Times By effectively insulating employers from paying wages to workers, it has reinforced an unequal power dynamic The coronavirus pandemic — and the measures taken by the central and state governments to contain it over the last five months — has led to widespread disruption across the country. A substantial part of this disruption is asymmetric in nature; that is, it has disproportionately affected vulnerable and marginalised people, those unable to...

-Hindustan Times The dire projections of an acute food shortage came to the fore on the completion of four months of lockdown restrictions, which were imposed in end-March in a bid to prevent the spread of the raging coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak and the despite the largesse from the state government for 94 lakh beneficiaries between April and June. Bhubaneswar: A survey of pension beneficiaries from the four migration- prone districts of...

Poisonous snakebites have killed more than a million Indians in the last two decades, finds a recently published article entitled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study. Published in the open access journal elifesciences.org, the research-based study has found that the country accounts for nearly half the total number of annual deaths in the world caused by snakebite envenoming. Who are the...

-Hindustan Times OPHI director Sabina Alkire, who led the development of the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) in 2010, said: “India remains the country that has the largest reduction in number of poor, with over 270 million persons leaving poverty 2005-6 to 2015-16”. India lifted as many as 270 million people out of multidimensional poverty between 2005-6 and 2015-16 – the most in a global study of 75 countries – reflecting progress before...

A recent survey that was conducted through telephonic interviews among 1,405 respondents across the states of Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan and Jharkhand reveals the precarious conditions of workers nearly 45 days after the announcement of COVID-19 lockdown. The report entitled Labouring Lives: Hunger, Precarity and Despair amid Lockdown tries to understand the extent (and depth) of job loss and hunger 45 days after the lockdown. Hunger and...