-The Hindu Loss of livelihoods has pushed poor families to opt for early marriages The COVID-19 Pandemic and subsequent lockdown have proved to be new drivers of child marriages in rural Madhya Pradesh with several reports of such ceremonies from different parts of the State during the ongoing marriage season. “I am a widow and I don’t have any kind of social security. Marriage is the only safe option for my daughters,” said...

-Livemint.com Politics in India has been based on caste in recent decades. But a rising middle class and increasing inequality within caste groups is paving the way for a class-based faultline. One cliché looms large in every election campaign in India: that caste politics may finally give way to class politics. But as counting begins on the day of the election verdict, caste subsumes every other factor, even in serious analyses of...

-The Indian Express Nearly 38 per cent respondents shared that their consumption of rice/wheat had decreased while 40.7 per cent said their consumption of pulses had come down and 57.6 per cent said their consumption of vegetables had reduced. Ahmedabad: The ‘Hunger watch’ survey carried out by Anna Suraksha Adhikar Abhiyan (ASAA), Gujarat to track the hunger situation amongst vulnerable and marginalised communities amid the of Covid-19 Pandemic revealed that 20.6 per...

-TheWire.in The MP Migrant Workers Project found that 90% of migrant workers who returned to the state during the COVID-19 lockdown did not receive any kind of monetary assistance. New Delhi: Satish Ranjan* used to work in Pune as a construction worker. When the Pandemic hit, he was forced to return to his home in Madhya Pradesh, like the lakhs of migrant workers who were forced to return – many by foot...

-Livemint.com A failure to protect incomes could widen the gap between have-nots and haves and thus hurt growth When the facts change, I change my mind," John Maynard Keynes is believed to have said almost a century ago. Responding to the economic after-shocks of the covid Pandemic, governments and central banks have been living by this maxim. In the UK and US, supposedly fiscally conservative governments have spent with abandon to prop...