-IndiaSpend.com A new study of the Rajasthan government's Bhamashah health insurance programme for poor households has found that just providing health insurance cover doesn't reduce gender inequality in access to even subsidised healthcare Jaipur: Women from poor households made about 235,000 fewer hospital visits compared to men for seven gender-neutral disease categories between January 2017 and October 2019, a new study analysing a Rajasthan state health insurance scheme has estimated. The Bhamashah...

-TheWire.in The pandemic disproportionately impacted women and young workers. A school bus driver is struggling to make ends meet driving a tempo for hire, purchased with an informal loan; a five-star chef is volunteering for an NGO preparing cooked meals for distribution in the slums of Bangalore; and an MCA degree-holder is working as a door-to-door water purifier technician. These and many more such anecdotes give us a glimpse into the disruption...

-TheWire.in/ PARI In Bihar's villages, during the lockdown last year, teenage girls were married off to young male migrant workers who returned home. Many are now pregnant and anxious about what comes next. Both are 17, both are pregnant. Both of them collapse easily into giggles, sometimes forgetting parental instructions to keep their gaze down. And both are terrified of what comes next. Salima Parveen and Asma Khatun (names changed) were both in...

The rise in COVID-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths compelled many state governments to impose local level lockdowns during April-May 2021. As of 20th April, 2021, partial lockdowns were noticed in 10 states across the country and complete lockdown was imposed in Delhi. As of 8th May, 2021, nearly the entire country was under complete lockdown as a result of either partial lockdowns and night curfews or complete...

-CBGAIndia.in India’s response to the pandemic has depended heavily on the exploited labour of women workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds. These are ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists, the cadre of frontline health workers that has been mobilised for everything from door-to-door surveys, distributing medicine kits, measuring oxygen saturation, monitoring containment zones and spreading awareness about vaccines. 70,000 such women recently went on strike in Maharashtra demanding higher pay,...