ActionAid Association's (AAA) national level survey among people dependent on the informal economy during the third phase of the national lockdown towards the end of May 2020 (i.e. between May 14th and May 22nd, 2020) has documented the "nature and extent of the transitions in the lives and livelihoods of informal workers, including migrant workers, during the pandemic and provide[s] an insight into the precarity they experience and the coping...

-Moneycontrol.com The RTI response shows that at least two companies — Jyoti CNV Automation and AMTZ Basic — to whom an advance was released, were later not recommended by the technical committee constituted under the DGHS There is a vast difference in the prices of ventilators bought under PM CARES fund, and the two of the companies to whom an advance was released were later not recommended by the technical committee constituted...

-The Hindu Business Line FSSAI issues order on 24 items even as it works on regulations for GM foods Come January 1, 2021, importers of 24 major food crops will have to mandatorily declare that the products are not genetically-modified and that they also have a non-GM origin. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has come out with this order to ensure that only non-GM food crops come into the...

-Livemint.com Since education policies and government programmes have greater implications for the socially marginalized, they should be open to public scrutiny and debate Anurag Behar’s article on the new educational policy 'A plea to educators at the cusp of a seminal shift in education' on 12 August in Livemint raises some very important and serious concerns and is therefore, deserving of attention. It points to a growing rift between framers of the...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...