-The Hindu Facilitating a bargain between wealth accumulators and welfare seekers seems to have become the key function of politics A new election season is around. Five States (Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Goa and Punjab) will elect new Assemblies and Chief Ministers in the coming weeks. Parties are wooing voters with dazzling new promises. The Aam Aadmi Party leader, Arvind Kejriwal, is offering ₹1,000 a month to all adult women (above age...
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Don’t link Aadhaar & voter ID -Usha Ramanathan
-Financial Express ”This is the swamp of unconstitutionality, and unwisdom, into which the ECI and the voter will be cast if this linking proceeds as proposed. The linking of the voter database with the UID database must bewilder anyone who has watched the progression of the UID project. It has been plagued by exclusion, fraud, leakage, biometric failure, insuperable barriers to updating the information on the database, and ‘civil death’. Attempts to...
More »Attacks on RTI Activists Are Rising. We Need Accountability Laws. -Aruna Roy, Mayank Labh and Meera M Panicker
-TheWire.in The recent attack on an RTI activist in Rajasthan's Barmer must be seen within a larger culture of violence in the country, being perpetrated to settle scores while the state says nothing. The Right to Information (RTI) application has long since drawn violence for its use as a tool to disrupt the corrupt status quo in the country and another such incident has recently taken place in Rajasthan. Amra Ram Godara, a...
More »Over a million paddy bags damaged in the open in Odisha due to rain, hailstorm -Priya Ranjan Sahu
-Down to Earth Most of the market yards had temporary sheds while several of them had permanent sheds More than a million bags of paddy lying in the open in market yards in Odisha’s Bargarh district have reportedly got damaged due to heavy rain and hailstorm, which also caused extensive damage to vegetable crops in the district. The rain started from the evening of December 28, 2021 with a spate of hailstorm in...
More »Inside the Winter of Discontent for India's Gig Workers -Kaushal Shroff
-TheWire.in A PIL seeking social security benefits for gig workers and platform workers brings to the front a storm of issues that have festered over the last few years. There is a storm of discontent brewing within India’s app-based worker community, which the Union government has been sidelining for far too long much to the dismay of the over 15 million gig workers in India. While the government persists with an apathetic attitude...
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