-Scroll.in The sharp drop in GDP is the largest in the country’s history – and even that may well underestimate the economic damage experienced by the poorest households. From April to June 2020, India’s GDP dropped by a massive 24.4%. According to the latest national income estimates, in the second quarter of the 2020-’21 financial year (July-September 2020), the economy contracted by a further 7.4%, with the third and fourth quarters (October...

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...

-IndiaSpend.com A new study of the Rajasthan government's Bhamashah health insurance programme for Poor Households has found that just providing health insurance cover doesn't reduce gender inequality in access to even subsidised healthcare Jaipur: Women from Poor Households made about 235,000 fewer hospital visits compared to men for seven gender-neutral disease categories between January 2017 and October 2019, a new study analysing a Rajasthan state health insurance scheme has estimated. The Bhamashah...

-TheWire.in The pandemic disproportionately impacted women and young workers. A school bus driver is struggling to make ends meet driving a tempo for hire, purchased with an informal loan; a five-star chef is volunteering for an NGO preparing cooked meals for distribution in the slums of Bangalore; and an MCA degree-holder is working as a door-to-door water purifier technician. These and many more such anecdotes give us a glimpse into the disruption...

-CBGAIndia.in India’s response to the pandemic has depended heavily on the exploited labour of women workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds. These are ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists, the cadre of frontline health workers that has been mobilised for everything from door-to-door surveys, distributing medicine kits, measuring oxygen saturation, monitoring containment zones and spreading awareness about vaccines. 70,000 such women recently went on strike in Maharashtra demanding higher pay,...