In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-Hindustan Times Overall, the enrolment of students in classes from pre-primary to higher secondary dipped by 77,585, showed the report released on Wednesday Close to four million students shifted to government-run schools in the 2020-21 academic year, according to a new ministry of education report, which captures how the pandemic affected learning and access to learning during a period when classes went virtual and millions of parents are believed to have lost...

-Newsclick.in The roots of the present crisis lie in wrong policies adopted over the last two decades that have undermined domestic production of fertilisers led by the public sector and increased dependence on imports and production by the private sector. Indian farmers have been facing a major crisis because of shortages in availability and an unprecedented rise in prices of fertilisers. Fertilisers are a critical input for agriculture, and a shortage in...

-The Hindu As ‘Writing with Fire’ competes at the Oscars, filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh look back on why they decided to follow three Dalit journalists for five years Six years ago, when New Delhi-based filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh attended a meeting at the Khabar Lahariya office in Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, they had no idea how deeply engaged they would soon get with the lives and work of the...

-The Hindu The decimation of BSP has hurt the SP chief the most in polls, say observers For somebody who threw the kitchen sink at the Bharatiya Janta Party during the election campaign, it has been a humbling loss for Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. Observers said everybody knew that nobody could defeat the BJP on the Hindutva pitch but Mr. Yadav got a ‘godsend opportunity’ in the form of...