-The Hindu Business Line As our governments think and rethink lockdown measures and scheme policy interventions, it is time we, as a society collective, pay attention to our children on the brink of irreversible damage What does it mean to lose one’s childhood to unsung labour? What is it like when books are replaced by bricks, playgrounds by agricultural fields, plastic toys with heavy-metal machines, alphabet recitations by silent cries of help?...

-The Hindu There is evidence to suggest that the PLFS data may underestimate the loss of earnings and fall in consumption The third annual round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data conducted during July 2019-June 2020 was released recently. The PLFS captures key indicators of the labour market such as the labour force participation rate (LFPR) — the proportion of population working or seeking work; worker-population ratio (WPR) — the...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-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,...

-IndiaSpend.com Health data relating to 2020-21 and April-May 2021 in the National Health Mission's Health Management Information System showed a spike in unexplained mortality in rural areas, and disruptions in India's routine immunisations during the Covid-19 pandemic Chennai: Key official health data that pointed to excess mortality and disrupted health services during the Covid-19 pandemic have suddenly gone offline, an IndiaSpend investigation shows. While government officials say that the reason for the...