-Scroll.in The shock move devastated India’s informal economy. Many small businesses never recovered, as a supply chain at the intersection of diamonds and plastic shows. Up till 8.30 pm on the night of November 8, 2016, Muniram Yadav was blissfully unaware of the announcement that had shaken the country just thirty minutes before. He was engrossed in work, in a tiny workshop in Mumbai’s Sakinaka suburb, supervising four labourers as they carried...

-Scroll.in Anganwadi staff need funds for infrastructure and supplies. Instead, the government gave them a new app that is riddled with problems. On the afternoon of August 23, the Chhota Sion urban health centre in the heart of Mumbai’s sprawling Dharavi slum was suddenly awash with pink. Nearly 80 women, all dressed in saris and salwar suits in various shades of the colour, trooped into its lobby. Breaking up into groups, they spent...

-Scroll.in Young people from marginalised communities are building networks to challenge the upper-caste capture of academic and professional spaces. One day sometime in mid 2020, Aditi Priya, a Masters’ graduate in economics employed with a research organisation, messaged Disha Wadekar, a lawyer, on Facebook. Priya needed help with research she was conducting on the link between police presence and gender-based violence on women, particularly in marginalised communities. She felt Wadekar, as a...

-Scroll.in They wanted to work, even as the number of women in India’s workforce fell. But a national upheaval crushed Jharkhand women’s dreams of new lives in Tamil Nadu. Simran Oraon has no regrets about the day she ran away from her home in Jharkhand all the way to Tamil Nadu. It was mid-April 2019, a few days after she had finished a two-month tailoring course at a skills training institute in Gumla,...

-Scroll.in It is the second academic year when children have been out of school across India. On a grey afternoon in July, children were out on the streets in Flower Garden, a slum in the Cottonpet area of Bengaluru. A few were playing with toys, others rode their tricycles, and one stood with a racquet in hand laughing uncontrollably at something. Oviya S stood quietly outside her house, her eyebrows drawn together,...