-The Hindu/ PTI Nearly 96% of the people surveyed under a food rights campaign in Maharashtra faced a drop in their earnings during the novel coronavirus-induced lockdown last year, a social body claims. Mumbai: Job losses and non-availability of casual work were the key reasons for this, and every fifth respondent was forced to go hungry because of no money to buy food, Mukta Srivastava, the State’s convener for the Anna Adhikar...

-The Hindu Study highlights the socio-economic impact of accidents There are more fatalities from road crashes among poor families rather than the rich shows a new World Bank study that highlights the socio-economic impact of road accidents — from access to post-accident medical care to coping with the financial distress caused by a mishap. In the study, low income households reported twice the numbers of deaths post-crash vis-à-vis high income households. The risk...

-The Hindu That there is no targeted employment programme to alleviate the immediate crisis is a matter of concern The Budget, at its simplest, is the government’s tentative income and expenditure statement. Like all financial statements, the devil lies in the fine print. At its broadest, the Budget is a pious statement of the government’s policy and ideological intentions. It is also the government’s statement of how it seeks to tackle the...

Large dams that cause environmental degradation and large-scale displacement, among other things, have been opposed in India by civil society organisations (CSOs), such as Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), National Alliance of People's Movement (NAPM) and People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). A recently published study by the United Nations University's Canada-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health along with other partner organisations reveals that tens of thousands of existing large...

-TheWire.in The pandemic and lockdown threw existing budgetary calculus completely out of line. But that provides an opportunity too. In December 2020, talking at a CII meet, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman reportedly stated: “100 years of India wouldn’t have seen a budget being made post-pandemic like this”. Was it a mere statement of fact, that never before had parts of the budget-making process been done in a virtual manner after a pandemic, or...