The rise in COVID-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths compelled many state governments to impose local level lockdowns during April-May 2021. As of 20th April, 2021, partial lockdowns were noticed in 10 states across the country and complete lockdown was imposed in Delhi. As of 8th May, 2021, nearly the entire country was under complete lockdown as a result of either partial lockdowns and night curfews or complete...

-CBGAIndia.in India’s response to the pandemic has depended heavily on the exploited labour of women workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds. These are ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists, the cadre of frontline health workers that has been mobilised for everything from door-to-door surveys, distributing medicine kits, measuring oxygen saturation, monitoring containment zones and spreading awareness about vaccines. 70,000 such women recently went on strike in Maharashtra demanding higher pay,...

-Firstpost.com For marginalised communities, modern education is a precious asset and a way for acquiring socio-economic mobility in an unequal society In the past few weeks, several students belonging to marginalised communities such as Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) have received offers to study in prestigious universities abroad including Royal Holloway London, Oxford University, SOAS, London, among others. However, privatisation in education has meant that the amount of wealth required for...

-Scroll.in The focus is on providing food grains to the very poor as against supporting that with more funding for existing nutrition-focussed welfare programmes. Data collated from a recent paper -studying the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 by Jean Dreze and Anmol Somanchi reflect the grim condition of India’s looming malnutrition crisis. In a co-authored essay around April 2020, we had argued how the “hidden costs of this pandemic” (and the...

-The Hindu Business Line The pandemic toll on the mental health of children, including instances of PTSD, has received too little attention “I love my father, but why does he behave like this?” asks a 13-year-old from a slum in Delhi who was sexually abused during the first lockdown. She and her mother were also beaten up often. The mother, a daily wager, was compelled to take the traumatised child with her...