-Scroll.in The migrant exodus will undoubtedly hurt the economy. But that is no excuse for forced labour. The Indian government’s policies towards its vulnerable migrant worker population were already a mess. This week, Karnataka made it worse. The Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state decided to cancel trains that would allow working-class people from other states to return to their homes five weeks after a national lockdown to combat Covid-19 left them stranded, often without...

-Newsclick.in The draft notification pushed during the lockdown, in more ways than one, tries to minimise public participation in determining impacts of any particular industrial project on livelihoods and environment. New Delhi: In what could spell catastrophe for the lives and livelihoods of millions of citizens across the country, the Central government has sought to introduce new rules whereby environmental clearances can be granted to industrial projects on a post facto basis....

-Committee to Protect Journalists On March 26, two days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national lockdown to control the spreading of COVID-19, Hindi-language daily Jansandesh Times reported that a tribe in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh state, didn’t have enough to eat due to the sudden announcement and that children were eating grass. The same day, the magistrate of Varanasi district, Kaushal Raj Sharma, sent a legal notice to the...

-Newsclick.in It is three months after the Act had been passed, but the government is yet to frame the rules. Three months ago, on December 11, 2019, Parliament of India passed the much controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Through CAA, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre introduced amendments in the existing citizenship act to accommodate the religious minorities of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh—except people from the Muslim community. Please click here to read more.   ...

-Newsclick.in Reviving the economy requires, apart from social peace, a powerful fiscal intervention going well beyond what neo-liberalism allows. Changes in estimation methods have of late made statistics on the Indian economy increasingly bewildering; besides, whenever the statistics show the performance of the economy in a poor light, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government simply suppresses them. Nothing, however, can suppress the fact that the Indian economy is sliding into a serious...