-The Hindu Dalit-Muslim alliances are not enough; upper caste Hindus are needed too, to restore secularism Ever since the Sachar Committee Report of 2006 demonstrated that the socio-economic conditions of Muslims have worsened compared to Dalits, some have argued that Muslims have become India’s new Dalits. It is further proposed that the two communities should forge an alliance to fight the Hindu Right to restore secularism because together they constitute a significant...

-The Hindu This is ‘abject poverty’, and if the economy is to be repaired, the number of the poor has to be meticulously counted The son of a corn merchant-turned sociologist, Charles Booth had little patience for Charles Dickens and others in his time, who used lyrical prose to describe the desperation of the poor in working class London. Booth was also angry, in 1885, over the claims made by F.D. Hyndman,...

-IndiaSpend.com Where are nutrition programmes failing and why? To accurately understand this and for ideas on how to efficiently target the crisis of malnutrition among Indian children, it is necessary to collect and use data from villages, says a new study Mumbai: India must incorporate village-level data in its policies on child malnutrition to target beneficiaries and their specific needs more effectively, says a new study that analysed data across 597,121 census...

-The Indian Express They will not only help capture the true scale of the tragedy, but will also help in planning better for the next waves of the pandemic. In his memoirs, the writer Suryakant Tripathi (1896-1961), better known as Nirala, described the river Ganga as “swollen with dead bodies” when the deadly second wave of the influenza pandemic struck India in 1918. The pandemic was a deeply traumatic experience for him,...

-The Hindu Analysis of excess deaths from the civil registration system spotlights the systematic obfuscation in official statements By all accounts, the mortality impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been exceptionally large. Crematoria, burial grounds, and, in some places, even riverbeds are full. Tragically, almost everyone has lost at least one person close to them. Given this reality, few people have much faith in official COVID-19 death counts. How many COVID-19 deaths...