-The Hindu It will complicate payment system, may lead to a reduction in funding, say experts. The Centre has asked the States to split wage payments under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme into separate categories for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and others from this financial year. Workers’ rights advocates said this will unnecessarily complicate the payment system, and expressed fears that it may lead to a reduction...
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A fatal war on transparency -Aniket Aga and Chitrangada Choudhury
-The Hindu Official secrecy on pandemic policies aggravates a crisis In August 2020, the Modi government constituted the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) as a nodal agency on all matters related to vaccine administration and rollout. Asked under the Right to Information (RTI) Act for details of the NEGVAC’s meetings, the Health Ministry, which anchors the expert group, replied that it does not know where the concerned documents...
More »Kaatu Yaanam to Ratha Sali: TN foundation conserves 156 varieties of native paddy species -Anjana Shekar
-TheNewsMinute.com Founded by Ananthan Krishnan, Himakiran and Parthasarathy VM, all of them organic farmers, the main aim of the Thondaimandalam Foundation is to focus on sustainable rural livelihoods. They say if an elephant were to enter a harvest-ready kaatu yanam (180-day crop) rice field, no one would know. For the sea of paddy, which would stand at least eight-feet tall, would completely hide the pachyderm. S Ganapathi Tamizhselvan, who is a paddy...
More »On CoWIN, Supreme Court flags digital divide
-The Hindu The court quoted from a National Statistics Office survey of 2018 which said that around four per cent of the rural households and 23% of the urban households possessed a computer Taking a dig at the Centre’s argument that the poor and marginalised can lean on friends to register online for vaccination, the Supreme Court has said even the digitally literate are finding it hard to get vaccine slots on...
More »594 doctors died in second wave of COVID-19, says IMA -Bindu Shajan Perappadan
-The Hindu So far, Delhi, Bihar, U.P. and Rajasthan have lost the maximum number of doctors. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) said that 594 doctors died during the second wave of COVID-19 across the country. It released an updated list on Wednesday and noted that Delhi (107), Bihar (96), Uttar Pradesh (67) and Rajasthan (43) have lost the maximum number of doctors so far. While no such count is available for other medical...
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