-The Telegraph The Union budget is an embodiment of unequal fiscal policy The finance minister and her ministry have betrayed, once again, their lack of understanding of the Indian economy or the conditions under which most Indians are living today. Despite attempts to ‘talk up’ the supposed recovery, the economy is weak and most people are hurting. India has seen one of the biggest increases in the number of poor and hungry people...

--Press release by the National Coalition on the Education Emergency (NCEE) dated January 29, 2022 An education emergency of unprecedented proportions has severely impacted hundreds of millions of children in India. Prolonged school closures have caused learning deprivation, student dropout, increased child labour, malnutrition, and early marriages that are compromising the future of our country. It is time to open schools and massively increase funding of public education with a clear focus...

-TheWire.in Faced with a Union government that puts its own image-building ahead of the good of the people, let us imagine a scenario where Budget 2022-23 is, instead, drafted by a government which is willing to cooperate with the states and respond to the needs of the people. No matter where we look, bad news on the economy just keeps pouring in. Despite all the official and unofficial media attempts to talk up...

-The Hindu The reduction of out-of-pocket expenditure that the NHA highlights is essentially due to a decline in utilisation of care Low Public Spending on Health in India has meant that people depend heavily on their own means to access health care. It causes rich-poor, rural-urban, gender and caste-based divides in access to health care, pushes people to poverty, and forces them to incur debt or sell assets. As a result, our...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...