-Newsclick.in It remains to be seen how many political parties pledge to protect the urban poor from eviction and homelessness and work for inclusive ‘Smart Cities’. Over 30 civil society groups consisting of slum dwellers, civil society organisations, women groups, other groups working amongst the urban poor, disabled women groups, street vendors, housing rights activists and so on assembled in Delhi on February 28 to set a new discourse for 2019. This...

-Livemint.com In conversation with Guy Standing, economist at the School Of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Neither the Narendra Modi government nor Rahul Gandhi have gotten minimum income scheme right, he says New Delhi: Income support is the big economic idea of the season. While the ruling BJP government announced a limited money transfer scheme targeted at farmers in the recent interim budget, the Congress has proposed to solve the country’s...

-The Indian Express A recent Democracy Index confirms the paradox of India being the world’s largest electoral wonder, but an increasingly flawed democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published its 11th report on the “State of Democracy in the World in 2018” titled “Me Too? Political participation, protest and democracy”. The EIU has over seven decades of experience in studying the spectrum of democracies in the world. The index made news...

-Press Release by All India Forum of Forest Movements (AIFFM), dated February 22, 2019 On 13 February, the Supreme Court of India, hearing a decade-old petition challenging the constitutional validity of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, ordered that forest dwellers whose claims for recognition of forest rights have been rejected would have to be evicted in a summary and time-bound manner. The order contains separate instructions for each state government to...

-Networkideas.org The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act that brought the MGNREGS into being was a unique piece of legislation in the history of independent India. It stipulated that employment was to be made available on demand, within a fortnight of being asked for, failing which an unemployment allowance had to be paid. True, its scope was confined only to rural areas, and it promised employment only up to 100 days per...