-Newslaundry.com Racism is as much a religion in India as is cricket. The Siddis know this too well. “We know that you Indians want to see us, the n*****, act like animals,” said Nazim Siddi, 30. Nazim’s words, and his deliberate usage of a racial slur, lashed me like a whip. I was attending a Goma performance on top of a secluded hillock behind the mazar of Baba Gohr in Ratanpur, located 30 km...

-The Hindu States creating artificial demand, says official; workers pushed into ‘forced labour’ by delayed payments, say activists The Centre’s flagship rural employment scheme has run out of funds halfway through the financial year, and supplementary budgetary allocations will not come to the rescue for at least another month when the next Parliamentary session begins. According to its own financial statement, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme shows...

-TheWire.in Corruption, poor quality construction materials and the specious implementation of schemes combined with the Centre’s flawed MSP policies have rendered the attempt to transform the region useless. Chitrakoot/ Banda: On a freezing night in early January, as anchors on television and radio jubilated in the new year and extolled the many ‘achievements’ of the incumbent government, Madhav Prasad, a 55-year-old farmer in Bundelkhand, lay anxious on a cot in his hut.  The...

-Scroll.in With the aim of understanding inequality from the lens of opportunities, a new index MEAsures the disproportionality of access across the country. The concept of equality of opportunity is rooted in the Rawlsian philosophical tradition, whereby people are expected to construct a society in a way that they would be happy for their position in society to be determined by a random draw. He argued that social positions should be formally...

-Livemint.com Value-addition per worker needs to rise sharply in several fields for the country to enhance prosperity and reduce inequality It is known that productivity is the key to economic prosperity. How do we raise the productivity of service workers? This is one of the biggest challenges that India faces which hasn’t yet received much attention. Why is this important? First, low and medium-productivity service sectors (services except real estate, business and professional...