-Newsclick.in Harassment by loan recovery agents hired by these apps has led to at least 21 suicides across India between 2020 and 2021. Meghna Patel took her first loan early in 2020 from an app called FlyCash, whose ads she had been seeing on Facebook. It was a small amount. Just Rs 500. She had to repay Rs 550, two weeks later. The app even had a borrowing limit of Rs 1,000. Recently,...

-Hindustan Times Workers who have registered so far belong to diverse occupations, such as construction, apparel manufacturing, fishing, gig and platform work, street vending as well as domestic work. Nearly half of 40 million workers of the country’s informal economy registered on a recently launched national portal are women, and most workers regardless of gender are from disadvantaged castes, official data that shines new light on India’s invisible unorganised labour force shows. Trends...

-NDTV.com Kolkata, which appears to be paying the price of puja shopping and pandal hopping, reported 242 new Covid infections this Friday. Last Friday, it was 127. Of these, 150 were fully vaccinated while 15 had the first dose. Kolkata: The COVID-19 numbers are on the rise in Kolkata since the end of Durga Puja festivities and now the graph is rising so sharply, safe houses and quarantine centres in the city...

-The Hindu Caste demographics do not have the deterministic effect on electoral outcomes that is often assumed As a new round of State elections approaches in India, political parties are crafting their electoral strategies. A large part of this exercise consists of constituency mapping, or gathering data about caste and community demographics, information about the local balance of power between groups, and the identification of local caste leaders, with the aim of...

When one of the three farm laws i.e., The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 was enacted last year, it was argued by its proponents that the legislation would allow the farmers to sell their produce (and the traders to purchase that produce) outside the Agricultural Produce Market Committee-APMC mandis after crop harvesting. In a way, that particular piece of legislation was enacted to end the...