-The New Indian Express BENGALURU: Sixty manual scavengers have died over the last 10 years while at work. The families of 23 victims were paid compensation ranging between `5 lakh and `10 lakh while 37 families are yet to be compensated, according to data available with the Social Welfare Department. But the reality is that many cases either go unreported or are considered as unnatural deaths and booked under various Acts. The Prohibition...

-DNA The joint study has found an increase in female-headed households (FHHs) and greater engagement of rural women in agricultural labour. Three days from now, March 8, is the International Women's Day. An important lesson on the relation between women and environment was first taught to us by rural women in the Himalayan region of Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand) who, in the early 1970s, embraced trees to save them from state-backed...

-TheCitizen.in NEW DELHI: Perhaps no other public policy debate in post-independence India has seen as much of an “inversion of reason” on the part of the government as the demonetization debate. When critics were pointing, on the basis of government statistics themselves, to the palpable failure of the demonetization measure to achieve its purported objective, which was to cripple the black economy, the government kept harping, in its justification, on the extraordinary...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre has raised wages under the rural job guarantee scheme - by the princely sum of one rupee a day in many states. The increase is the lowest in the 11-year history of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and leaves its wage rates in 11 states stuck far below their minimum wages, set by the state governments. The eastern states are the worst hit. As...

-The Indian Express Demonetisation shows India’s social welfare measures like MGNREGS to be worryingly patchy Following the announcement of demonetisation, reports of its devastating impact on informal sector workers, farmers and migrants began to pour in from across the country. Seeking evidence on two questions — do social security measures work in the face of such an economic shock, and do these programmes themselves face disruption because of demonetisation — we conducted...