-TheWire.in Across India, unorganised workers registering for the e-Shram card have to wade through rumours of monetary benefits, fear of fraud, and a daunting process. On June 31, 2021, in response to a petition on the struggles faced by migrant workers during the pandemic, the Supreme Court directed the central government to accelerate the process of building a database of unorganised workers. The government responded by launching the e-Shram portal – a...

-Leaflet.in Informal migrant workers in metropolitan cities of India have faced multiple forms of vulnerabilities in the last two years of the pandemic. Linkages across schemes for such workers are absolutely critical to creating a social security net that protects them from falling into similar cycles of poverty and destitution during macro and micro economic distresses. ON the occasion of International Labour Day, or ‘May Day’, we explore the dimensions of vulnerabilities...

-The Hindu Amidst the scattered experimentation now, the Centre must offer strategic policy guidance for inter-State coordination Only two years ago, in the wake of a nationwide lockdown, India was left shocked by the plight of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres, facing hunger, exhaustion and violence, to get to the safety of their home villages. The dire circumstances of the migrants tugged at our collective heartstrings. They became the focus of...

Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...

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...