-Down to Earth Reflections on Supreme Court order to evict ‘illegitimate’ tribals from the forests There is an ominous significance to the February 13, 2019 order of the Supreme Court on “illegitimate” forest-dwellers. When we first heard of it, we felt a rising dismay and shock at this judicial legitimation of unparalleled atrocity against the tribals. The order is nothing less than the final legitimised expropriation of the tribal communities (poor landless)...

-Down to Earth The new government has to focus on the rural population, their aspirations and the economy By this time most of us know Sunaina Rawat. Still a brief introduction: she is a 12-year-old girl from a village in Uttar Pradesh. When the news channel NDTV’s head Prannoy Roy interviewed her on life and aspirations while covering elections, she immediately became one of the most imposing symbol for the country’s rural...

-The Hindu More than a ‘more jobs’ approach, addressing structural issues which keep women away from the workforce is a must India is in the middle of a historical election which is noteworthy in many respects, one of them being the unprecedented focus on women’s employment. The major national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, have reached out to women, and their respective manifestos talk of measures to create more...

-The Hindu If it’s the government’s case that NSSO figures are suspect, what has it based policy decisions on? Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri said last week, “we definitely have a data crisis,” and blamed academics for creating a “false narrative”. Yet, at the heart of the data crisis in India is the Central government, which has been holding back important data. Most recently, it did...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The so-called mohalla clinics, or neighbourhood health centres, are an important part of the ruling Aam Aadmi Party’s electoral campaign. AAP had promised 1,000 across Delhi, but opened just 189 till December last year, attributing the failure to start the rest to bureaucratic hurdles. TOI visited eight mohalla clinics in north, east and central Delhi to find that while patients were mostly satisfied with the...