-The Hindu Business Line Trade union seeks urgent measures to alleviate pain of joblessness, drastic fall in income Trade unions and industrial associations painted a grim picture of the unemployment scenario in the country at a recent meeting of the Labour Standing Committee. The trade unions demanded urgent measures such as direct cash transfers to address job loss and wage loss, while the representatives of industries demanded a re-look at the current...

-Down to Earth Child marriages surged after COVID-19 First Wave; streamlined state efforts helped arrest the trend, claim officials As many as 3,970 villages in Odisha were declared child marriage-free between January and the first week of July 2021. The development has coincided with second wave of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic; the state had registered a surge in child marriages during the First Wave. In 2020, only 62 villages were declared...

The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

-The Hindu Underestimation is likely as the CRS is still an imperfect system, with potential sources of error Over the last month, Indian journalists from across the country have accessed and reported on State-level all-cause mortality from the Civil Registration System (CRS), currently confidential and closed to the public. While India’s official death toll from COVID-19 has been suspect from the very beginning — for reasons that are partly institutional and partly...

-TheWire.in Every sanitation worker’s life in India is a nightmare on any ordinary day. Add to this the callousness of administrations leaving them to face the virus without gear and training and the result is pure hell. Bokaro (Jharkhand): As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic tightens its grip on the country, the Chas Municipal Corporation in Jharkhand’s Bokaro district appears to have learned a few things from the last time...