-Livemint.com 30% of India’s urban population may deplete their lifetime savings by the end of June and would find it difficult to meet essential consumption In the best of times, India’s poor lead a fragile existence but in the worst of times their situation becomes extremely precarious. The lockdown of the country over the past few months has discomfited everyone but it has hit the urban poor the hardest. Measuring vulnerability accurately is...

-Hindustan Times Responses have been elusive on critical issues, including health care infra, PM Cares fund, schemes, and migrants In the lethal jaws of a pandemic, when lives and livelihoods are at stake, the information law of a democracy is expected to live up to its responsibilities — to empower the citizens and to ensure transparency and accountability. Free flow of information is an essential component of crisis management. And this is...

-Hindustan Times The government has undermined secular democracy; social justice; federalism; and economic self-reliance Surreal is, perhaps, the only way to describe marking of the first anniversary of the Modi 2.0 government. As the government data detailing the pre-coronavirus disease destruction of the economy and the consequent ruination of crores of lives during the last year was being released, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi was writing to all of us describing the...

-The Hindu Nationalism is not going to solve the big problems, says the economist. If the catastrophic human toll of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was the first wave to strike the world this year, its severe economic consequences – including loss of livelihoods of the poor across countries, leading to massive internal displacement and starvation in many cases – have been the second wave. It is in this context that the seminal work...

-The Hindu Business Line Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha among better performers in providing work: Rural Development Ministry data Less than half the rural households that demanded work in the last 45 days were offered work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), data on the Ministry of Rural Development website show. Data updated as on May 15 show that 2.48 crore rural households across India had demanded work in the...