-India Spend/ Scroll.in While the total number of prison inmates rose by 1% between 2019 and 2020, the number of undertrial inmates increased by nearly 12% Three in four prisoners in India’s jails are under trial, according to government data for the year 2020, the latest year for which such data is available. This is the highest share of undertrial detainees in prison since at least 1995, the earliest year for which...

-TheWire.in BJP has now realised that Hindutva and identity politics by themselves are not enough to win. In post-Mandal India, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempt to build electoral alliances tying upper castes and non-dominant OBCs is not new. This is a strategy the party used in the mid-1990s across North India to resist the consolidation of pro-Mandal parties and prevent the formation of large coalitions of “backwards”. Mid-1990s onwards, the BJP distributed...

-Newsclick.in Primarily inhabited by the scheduled caste community, Bundelkhand is home to the most backward villages — where Yogi government's developmental schemes have not reached. NewsClick visits these villages to understand the electorate’s situation here. Banda (Uttar Pradesh): Village after villages wear a deserted look, with locks hanging on the doors of predominantly kutcha houses with bamboo, mud, thatch, straw and unburnt bricks walls and roofs made of straw or reeds, in...

-The Hindu Policy efforts to formalise the economy will have limited results as the bulk of informal units are petty producers Since 2016, the Government has made several efforts to formalise the economy. Currency demonetisation, introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), digitalisation of financial transactions and enrolment of informal sector workers on numerous government Internet portals are all meant to encourage the formalisation of the economy. But why the impetus...

In the previous news alert, we looked at the under-nutrition problem in the Bundelkhand region in terms of 3 indicators -- proportion of children under 5 years who are stunted (height-for-age); proportion of children under 5 years who are wasted (weight-for-height); and proportion of children under 5 years who are underweight (weight-for-age). However, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data also indicates that severe under-nutrition like severe wasting and anaemia among...