-CBGAIndia.in India’s response to the pandemic has depended heavily on the exploited labour of women workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds. These are ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists, the cadre of frontline health workers that has been mobilised for everything from door-to-door surveys, distributing medicine kits, measuring oxygen saturation, monitoring containment zones and spreading awareness about vaccines. 70,000 such women recently went on strike in Maharashtra demanding higher pay,...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) ‘Analysis of Union Budget’ is a publication which Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) brings out every year following the presentation of the Union Budget in Parliament. This document presents our analysis of the priorities and trends in the Union Budget with regard to the sectors and issues that are directly relevant for the poorer sections of the population. Accordingly, this publication focuses...

-Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability Despite considerable progress made over the decade, India still carries the burden of undernutrition with 38.4, 21, and 35.8 per cent of children under five facing stunting, wasting, and underweight respectively, more than 50 per cent of children and women being anaemic, and 31.5 per cent of women having less than normal body mass index (BMI). Interventions by the government to combat undernutrition are covered under...