-The Indian Express Domestic workers must be brought within the purview of labour laws. The extreme abuse and mistreatment of domestic workers is becoming a part of day-to-day city life, as the recent cases of brutality in Delhi show. This is not to suggest that such incidents never occurred before, but the intensity and scale of such brutal violence are definitely becoming worse. This is alarming, given that there has been a...

-Outlook New Delhi: The Centre today asked state governments to put all information related to implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Public Distribution System in public domain. It has also asked states to ensure proactive disclosure under Right to Information (RTI) Act of information on public works done by a department at block and panchayat levels. Section 4 of the RTI Act, 2005 lays down that information should be...

-The Business Standard The structural changes in India's rural workforce Seldom in the past has the country's labour market gone through structural changes faster than it has in recent years. Apart from a sharp decline in the proportion of workers employed in agriculture, the perceptible withdrawal of women from the workforce is the most striking feature of India's labour market. Going by the numbers the census and the National Sample Survey Office...

-Outlook New Delhi: Sanitation activists today observed 'World Toilet Day' and alleged that 3.75 crore lavatories in India as claimed by Ministry for Rural Development did not exist and were "missing". Activists of Right to Sanitation (RTS) Campaign's India chapter demanded an inquiry into the "huge gap" in the number of toilets existing on the field and the number provided in the data by the Rural Development Ministry and Census 2011. On the...

-The Hindustan Times The current electoral discourse shows an amazing disconnect with the actual reality of the deteriorating livelihood conditions of our people. The other day, the BJP PM aspirant thundered in Bangalore that the BJP seeks to create confidence and not fear among the people. The 2002 Gujarat communal pogrom makes this sound incredulous. There is nothing in the BJP's campaign pitch that offers any solution or a methodology for...