-The Hindu There is a collective culpability in the social crime during the lockdown — of the dispossession of India’s Working poor The traumatic months of the national lockdown lay bare many troubling truths about the profound estrangement of people of privilege from the Working poor. They reveal a society in which the privileged are extraordinarily comfortable with inequality, and wanting in elementary empathy and solidarity. They confirm that the veneer of...

-Hindustan Times Less than 57% of the people who sought Work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) have received jobs under the programme. At a time when millions of migrant Workers who have returned home to the hinterland are looking towards it for a livelihood, the government’s flagship rural jobs programme has got off to a slow start in the new financial year, government data show, amid the...

-TheWire.in There remains a wide chasm between the financial resources committed in budgets and the actual expenditure aimed at providing social security benefits for Workers. The unprecedented crisis that the unplanned lockdown pushed Workers into has once again forced social activists and researchers to contemplate over whether a legislation passed in 2008 by parliament could have provided relief to Workers. Careful scrutiny of the financial resources as committed in budgets and the actual...

-The Indian Express Privatisation does not make a self-reliant nation. A decentralised, people-centric approach to development will help Mahatma Gandhi’s conception of self-reliance was of simple living and self-sufficiency. The basic idea was to use local resources and a local Workforce for the production of commodities for local consumption to the extent possible, with minimal dependence on the outside world. But the Indian government’s clarion call for “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (self-reliant India) has...

-The Hindu There are four things that need to be done in the country in the wake of the pandemic crisis When we hear the word migration, we think of Kerala and West Asia, or the United States and the West. However, the number of Indians who have migrated over the past decades to these geographies is minuscule compared to the vastness of the movement within the country. A few years ago,...