The virility of Muslim men vis-à-vis men from other religious communities have often been used as a political tool and to create a divisive agenda just before elections for getting votes from the majority of the Indian electorate who are Hindus. Instead of focusing on positive agendas like human development, employment generation, and poverty reduction, political campaigns just before the elections oftentimes reduce to mere communal propaganda (when a lot...

-Rediff.com Militant labour policies compounded a poor security environment for capital in West Bengal and encouraged the business community to relocate. constraining the private sector’s right to hire freely could well be the coup de grace. As with Calcutta/Kolkata, it will probably take a decade for Gurgaon/Gurugram to feel the difference, says Kanika Datta Gurgaon, the city that accounted for a significant amount of Haryana’s GDP long before it became Gurugram, is...

-Press statement by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha dated 17th November, 2021 The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has provided a cushion to millions of rural households amidst great economic distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. A substantial portion of the household expenditure in rural areas has been met through the NREGA wages and the nation has witnessed a significant rise in the demand for work under the programme since the...

-The Hindu Yawning gap between States in access to online education, says the study. The percentage of rural children who were not enrolled in school doubled during the pandemic, with Government schools seeing an increase in enrolment at the expense of private schools, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2021. Over a third of children enrolled in Classes 1 and 2 have never attended school in person. However, enrolment does...

The increase in the total number of suicides committed in India during 2020 in comparison to the previous years has hit the headlines recently. While some media commentators have stated that the economic distress (caused by job loss, income loss, failure of business, and growing hunger, among other things) in 2020 could have led to more suicides being committed, others have said that home isolation and deteriorating mental health (associated...