-TheWire.in On January 1, an 80-year-old woman died of starvation. The family slipped through the many government schemes meant to provide relief. Outside her deceased mother’s rented house in Mahuadanr block of Jharkhand’s Latehar district sat Bhagiya Birjain. Bhagiya, a widow, lived in a nearby settlement after her marriage. She was the first to arrive after hearing that her mother, Budhni Birjiyan, 80, died while she was alone, on the night of...

-TheWire.in In an interview with The Wire, former secretary to the government of India P.S. Krishnan says economically weaker sections require financial aid, not reservation. P.S. Krishnan, the former secretary to government of India, was one of the crucial people behind the enactment of several historic laws regarding social justice. The current Bill proposed by the government to provide reservation to economically weaker upper castes in jobs and education, he says, violates...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...

-TheWire.in The national auditor believes that such methods allow the Centre to understate the true fiscal and revenue deficits in a given year. New Delhi: India’s national auditor has raised red flags over the Narendra Modi government’s propensity to borrow funds using “off-budget” methods, a practice that allows it to finance capital and revenue spending while maintaining deficit targets. The criticism comes from an audit report tabled in parliament on Tuesday, but is...

-TheWire.in Under pressure to eliminate leprosy, the government is unwilling to record new cases. Social stigma and failure to detect cases early are hurdles in eradicating the disease. New Delhi: Leprosy is back in India. Health officials and activists celebrated 13 years ago when India announced that leprosy had been eliminated as a public health concern. Alarm bells rang as the Central Leprosy Division of the health ministry reported that 135,485 new...