The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...

-Newsclick.in Healthcare professionals and experts have raised concerns about the impact of the digital health mission’s framework on data privacy and access to health. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday launched the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which he said would “strengthen health facilities” in the country. via video conference. Currently, the project is being implemented in a pilot phase in six Union Territories. In his Independence Day speech in 2020, Narendra Modi...

-TheWire.in The 'Freedom of the Net', an annual report that analyses the state of human rights in the digital sphere, found plenty to object to in the Indian context. New Delhi: “Where democratic checks and balances are lacking, government officials will exploit regulation to punish any company that moderates politicians’ speech, or pushes back against arbitrary orders to remove content or hand over data.” These lines come from Freedom House’s latest edition of...

-Newslaundry.com The boom of the 2000s met the inevitable decline of 2008, followed by a political atmosphere that was hostile to independent journalism. What caused India’s news media to become an elaborate PR machine for the government and corporates? It’s the economy, stupid. Let me unpack this a bit by comparing two numbers from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s monthly employment data. Five years ago, in September 2016, there were about 10.3...

-Civil Society News, Gurugram THROUGHOUT the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic, the extent of the tragedy in India was mostly unknown. How many people had really died? Were they men or women? Information was anecdotal and speculative. This April, there were queues at crematoriums and burial grounds, but even as bodies piled up there were no reliable figures to go by. We now have some figures based on data-hunting...