-Newsclick.in Pinarayi Vijayan’s government is supplying food kits and distributing social security pension to ensure no one remains hungry or destitute The Left Democratic Front (LDF) government is supplying food kits and distributing social security pension as celebrations for the harvest festival of Onam, which falls on August 21, have already started. Despite the Opposition’s criticism of these measures in the light of the daily spike in Covid cases, the Pinarayi Vijayan government...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-The Hindu Malappuram, the most densely populated district of Kerala, epitomises the challenges the State faces in controlling the rising number of COVID-19 infections. Abdul Latheef Naha and C. Maya explain how the State, which seemed to have a grip on the pandemic, has been faltering “Two people have died. Please come and pack the bodies,” a nurse tells the cleaning staff who are on a break. Within a few minutes, cleaning...

-HindustanTimes.com Contrary to conventional wisdom, a comparative study of elections since 1980 indicates that verdicts are, if anything, getting less decisive and election wins are becoming narrower Are Indian voters empowering governments with more decisive mandates? This is the emerging wisdom among many experts and observers of Indian politics. For instance, pollster Pradeep Gupta, in his book, How India Votes: And What It Means, has argued that new forms of technology are enabling...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...