-The Hindu A year after the lockdown, jobs are not only harder to find, they pay less New Delhi/ Noida: Construction sites, industrial clusters, markets and homes in the National Capital Region (NCR) are abuzz with activity, but for the migrant workers who make a living in these spaces, life is far from normal a year after the country was locked down to curb the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020. Almost a...

-India.Mongabay.com * In its latest decision, the Indian government’s ministry of environment has come out with an order to help a certain category of mining projects avoid public hearing while seeking environment clearance. * This decision is mainly for projects which were granted environment clearance under environmental impact assessment notification 1994 after a public hearing was conducted. * But experts note that public hearings should be understood as a critical tool for good...

-Article-14.com In 2018, India diluted environmental safeguards when it ‘standardised’ or made simpler permissions for industry by expert panels. Now, as the government pushes the use of dirtier domestic coal by power plants, further dilution is underway, increasing health risks and imperilling the environment New Delhi: Standardised conditions will be “monitorable”. They will bring “uniformity”. They will help in “expediting the process of environmental clearance without compromising environmental norms”. These are claims the ministry of...

-Scroll.in In patriarchal societies, industrialisation and structural transformation are necessary preconditions for the emancipation of women. Around 1900, women in East Asia and South Asia were equally oppressed and unfree. But over the course of the 20th century, gender equality in East Asia advanced far ahead of South Asia. What accounts for this divergence? The first-order difference between East and South Asia is economic development. East Asian women left the countryside in droves...

-Article-14.com Instead of expensive, lawful compensation, about 10 states now offer farmers, landowners a shiny barter deal: Hand over your land, get a smaller plot when the area is ‘developed’. In Punjab, we investigate how developers get cheap land and owners wait years. Mohali: In 2010, vegetable vendor Surjeet Singh handed over the nine-acre farm he and his family owned to the Punjab government’s Greater Mohali Area Development Authority, which hoped to...