-The Hindu Households coped with the loss of income by reducing food intake, selling assets, and borrowing from friends, relatives and money-lenders The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially increased informality in employment, leading to a decline in earnings for the majority of workers, and consequent increase in poverty in the country, according to ‘State of Working India 2021: One Year of Covid-19’, a report brought out annually by Azim Premji University’s Centre for...

-Scroll.in In spite of the media hype, the BJP was no match for the Trinamool Congress juggernaut. The 2021 Assembly elections in West Bengal were bitterly fought. The Bharatiya Janata Party marshalled all its resources, pumping in huge sums of money, bringing in national leaders, influencing election arrangements and getting large sections of the national media to portray it as the favourite. In the end, it all came to nought. The BJP fell...

-The Hindu With logic, and data from unimpeachable sources, former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi’s book debunks the myth around exaggerated fears of Indian Muslim numbers An impartial analysis of Islamophobia in India would reveal that what generated it was not Islam but a sense of political insecurity born out of exaggerated fears of Muslim numbers. These anxieties came to the fore in the early 1900s after the partition of Bengal, the...

-GoIMonitor.com Study shows that hold of caste and social standing persists despite affirmative actions like reservations. Cities offer better occupational mobility than villages ARE YOU likely to be poor and socially backward if your grandfather was too?  A latest paper finds that educational levels have increased in India over three generations but people are still holding same occupations. So, there is clear evidence of “grandfather effect”. This multigenerational mobility differs in social groups....

-The Hindu Mamata Banerjee’s assumption that Bengali nationalism could block anti-incumbency and Hindutva may be optimistic The Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in West Bengal is a unique specimen in understanding anti-incumbency. Welfare schemes that usually make incumbents popular have added to the anti-incumbency woes of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, as the workers of her party made those the easy and only option for rent-seeking. ‘Cut money’, or the cut for TMC local...