-The Hindu Major drop seen in open defecation India has made great gains in providing basic sanitation facilities since the start of the millennium, accounting for almost two thirds of the 650 million people globally who stopped practising open defecation between 2000 and 2017. However, a monitoring report by UN organisations released on Tuesday also shows that there has been absolutely no growth in the population with access to piped water facilities over...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Villages where people still defecate in open face nearly 13 times higher risk of faecal contamination of ground water as compared to open defecation free (ODF) villages, says a study by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The assessment has also found that risk of ground water contamination in Bihar, one of the states which is yet to be declared ODF, is maximum at nearly 36%. The study,...

-TheWire.in The first phase of the survey by the labour department also found that most child labourers do not attend school. New Delhi: A sample survey by the Telangana labour department has found between 80-90% of child labourers in the state belong to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. According to The News Minute, the first phase of the survey across 10 districts in 56 mandals identified 9,724 child labourers. Most of these...

-The Hindu There needs to be robust infrastructure for official statistics so that governments do not suppress inconvenient truths Over the past two weeks, headlines have focussed on declining employment between 2011-12 and 2016-17; loss of jobs under the National Democratic Alliance government, particularly post-demonetisation; and the government’s refusal to release a report using the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) documenting this decline, leading to resignations of two members of the National...

-The Hindu India has the technological capacity, the financial resources, and the need for a simple, transparent basic income scheme In 2010-2013, I was principal designer of three basic income pilots in West Delhi and Madhya Pradesh, in which over 6,000 men, women and children were provided with modest basic incomes, paid in cash, monthly, without conditions. The money was not much, coming to about a third of subsistence. But it was...