-The Hindu Council leaves the 5% tax levied on vaccines unchanged. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council on Saturday decided to waive the tax levied on two critical drugs against COVID-19 and mucormycosis — tocilizumab and amphotericin B — and reset the tax rate to 5% for 14 major pandemic relief items, till September 30. Non-BJP-ruled States registered a strong dissent, terming the continued imposition of GST on critical COVID supplies and...

-The Hindu Scheme is a walk-in process and does not require beneficiaries to pre-register More than 4.5 lakh residents have been provided free ration by the Delhi government so far and efforts are under way to iron out issues related to the supply of ration at a few sites over the last few days. According to the Delhi government, as much as 5,000 MT of dry ration has been provided at centres in...

-Counterview.net A civil society statement, prepared for endorsement from workers’ organisations and concerned citizens by senior economists Amit Basole, Babu Mathews, Gautam Bhan, Jean Dreze, Rajendran Narayan and Ravi Srivastava after several rounds of discussion with trade unions, lawyers and grassroots organisation, has insisted that the Government of India come up with a national relief and recovery package immediately. “Without the direct support of such a package, simply unlocking the economy will...

-Scroll.in The head of Azim Premji’s Centre for Sustainable Employment on the tremendous distress hiding beneath job market statistics in India. If you looked at just the bare employment figures for India over 2020, you might think that most people recovered from the shock of the national lockdown and the economic crisis that followed. Yet though there was indeed a recovery before the brutal second wave hit, the headline numbers paper over...

-Scroll.in Indians need more relief measures during the second Covid-19 wave. Even before the pandemic hit, India was one of the world’s most malnourished countries. As could be expected for such a country with such poor development indicators, Covid-19 hit India’s poor hard. To compound the problem, the Indian government put in place what was the world’s harshest lockdown with little planning. A new paper by economists Jean Drèze and Anmol Somanchi has...