-United Nations News Around half a billion people work fewer paid hours than they would like, or are not getting enough access to paid work, shows a study published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) on Monday, which also forecasts that unemployment will rise by about 2.5 million this year. After nine years of relatively stable global unemployment, the World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2020 puts the rising jobless numbers down...

-The Hindu Bengaluru: The NITI Aayog proposal to hand over district hospitals with 750 beds to private medical colleges, citing the public-private-partnership (PPP) arrangements in Karnataka and Gujarat, has come under severe criticism from health activists and doctors, who feel it will further compromise quality and access to healthcare, mainly for the poor. They have demanded that the move be dropped without further consultation. The Centre’s top think tank recently released for...

-The Indian Express Centre, Tripura, and Mizoram have signed an agreement with the Bru/Reang community that promises to end their 23-year-old internal displacement crisis. How did the deal come about, and what happens now? Agartala: Twenty-three years after ethnic clashes in Mizoram forced 37,000 people of the Bru (or Reang) community to flee their homes to neighbouring Tripura, an agreement has been signed to allow them to remain permanently in the latter...

-The Hindu Supreme Court issues notice to Centre on the petition by a law student The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre to respond to a plea filed by a law student seeking the implementation of the Justice J.S. Verma Committee report on crime against women and children. The court issued notices to the government on a plea by B. Srinivas Goud, represented by advocates Ramaswami Balaji and Shravan Kumar, for...

-The Hindu The present national accounting and analytical framework misses out on many key dimensions of a complex economy The new series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures with 2011-12 as base, released in 2015, has not gone well with analysts; the withholding of employment-unemployment data for some time and consumer expenditure data, which is not released, added to this unease. Bringing the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under the fold of...