-The Indian Express New India cannot view empowerment of women merely as economic resource. Last month, Niti Aayog released a report on state-level progress across various indicators under the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The comprehensive index score on gender equality (Goal 5) revealed that all Indian states, except Kerala and sikkim, fall in the red zone, signifying low performance. Despite such worrisome findings in its own report, Niti Aayog’s almost simultaneously...

-The Indian Express I think packaging a significant UBIS with a simultaneous increase in the taxes on the rich will help macro-economic stability, apart from assuaging the poor who will face some of the price rise in commodities or services, when subsidies are withdrawn. After my last op-ed in this paper (The safety net of the future) several readers, intrigued by the idea of a Universal Basic Income Supplement (UBIS) proposed...

-The Telegraph The scheme envisages providing jobs to a member of every family who does not have a government job Gangtok: The sikkim Assembly on Thursday approved creation of over 16,000 temporary jobs in different departments as part of the government’s ‘one family, one job’ scheme announced by chief minister Pawan Chamling earlier this year. The scheme envisages providing jobs to a member of every family who does not have a government job. “We...

Just a few days ahead of the Kisan Mukti March in Delhi NCR, the provisional results of the Agriculture Census 2015-16 became available in the public domain. The report, among other things, highlights the long-term problems affecting Indian agriculture including fragmentation of land holdings (particularly the marginal and small ones) and shrinking average size of farm land. The provisional results of the latest Agriculture Census reveal that at the national level...

-TheWire.in Perhaps we can visualise a farmers’ march 20 years from now, with one more demand: resettlement, for lands and homes they have lost to the vagaries of a shifting climate. A few years ago, a group of us from Delhi, along with members of the Gujarat Agricultural Labour Union and the International Union of Foodworkers, went to eastern Gujarat to speak to farmers about how a changing climate could be affecting...