-The Hindu General category is better off than the SCs and STs, it says Sharp inequalities exist across different caste, religious, class and gender categories on various health indicators, according to a report by Oxfam India. The report titled “India Inequality Report 2021: India’s Unequal Healthcare Story” shows that the “general category is better off than the SCs and STs, Hindus are better off than Muslims, the rich are better off than the...

-GaonConnection.com A new study points out how waste segregation suffers as 70% of households in Haridwar and 90% in Rishikesh use a single bin for waste disposal; and a large chunk of plastic waste flows into the local water bodies, including the Ganges. Up to 35 per cent of the total plastic waste generated in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, leaks into its water bodies. Twenty kilometres to the northeast from Haridwar, the situation in...

The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

-Press release by National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) dated 2nd July, 2021  The sudden and unplanned lockdown imposed by the union government in March 2020 in the wake of pandemic had caused immense hardship to the informal sector workers. After much criticism and concern on its inaction, Supreme Court on 26.05.2020 took suo moto cognizance of “problems and miseries of the migrant labourers”. Later, several persons associated with people’s organisations...

-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,...