-Press statement by the National Coalition on the Education Emergency (NCEE) dated March 17, 2022 The NCEE conducted a rapid households survey of parents in Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu about their children's education during the pandemic and the main finding of this study is that poor parents are desperate about the education future of their children and fully conscious of the devastating toll that prolonged school closure has taken on...

-Down to Earth Wildfires have been reported from the buffer zone of Silent Valley National Park apart from Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, Attappadi Reserve Forest and Walayar Reserve Forest Kerala has witnessed raging wildfires in the last four days as an unusually early summer has raised temperatures by two to three degrees Celsius above average. The state’s flora and fauna have suffered as a result of the climate change-induced extreme weather events. Wildfires have...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-CBGA Blog India presented its latest Union Budget (for FY 2022 -23) in early February amid much hope, as the country is still reeling from the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic, which has lasted for two years. To deal with the pandemic induced socio-economic crisis, countries across the world  have been announcing policy measures outside of their annual budgets. The Indian government, too, made many such announcements, but given the scale of the...

-Down to Earth Farmers in the state are not getting urea; if they are, it is at almost double the price Urea prices are skyrocketing in Chhattisgarh due to the government’s decisions these days. So bad is the situation that farmers are being forced to buy urea on the black market and then cultivate paddy at a higher cost and bear the losses. Due to this, farmers from Raipur, Mahasamund, Bilaspur and...