-The Hindu While the youth have abandoned villages for work in distant towns, children have dropped out of schools after pandemic Andrahal: Perched at a height of 3,500ft above sea level in the hilly Malkangiri district of Odisha, this village is difficult to access and so are its inhabitants — the Bondas, a particularly vulnerable tribal group, known for their secluded lives away from the mainstream. However, the lack of access has not...
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How a boat journey in the mid-1960s started Kerala’s Gulf Boom -Gita Aravamudan
-TheNewsMinute.com Kerala has become a state fueled by a remittance economy, but the origins of this, dates back to several decades. In the summer of 1980, I visited Kerala’s Varkala in Thiruvanathapuram for the first time. It was the peak of the first Gulf boom. The media was full of stories on the ones who had made it big. But I was doing an article on the petrodollar paupers — the ignored...
More »Can raising the approved labour budget from 280.76 crore person-days to 306.6 crore person-days help the unskilled returnee migrants who prefer MGNREGA to Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan?
Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...
More »The Peshwa’s tax holiday: How the Mughals and Marathas dealt with Distress Migration -Mario da Penha
-The Hindu Diverse regimes in Early Modern India often saw the Distress Migration of rural inhabitants when, much like today, displacement became the forced choice between hope and hunger The scale of the migrant labourer exodus from the precariousness of cities to the security of their home villages has few parallels in Indian history. Economist Chinmay Tumbe estimates that by the end of May, no fewer than 30 million Indians had moved...
More »SWAN’s third report outlines the perpetual plight of migrants in terms of food shortage, income insecurity and travel difficulties during the lockdown
On June 5th this year, the Stranded Workers Action Network, comprising volunteers from various civil society groups, academics and students enrolled in university education, released its third report entitled ‘To Leave or Not to Leave? Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and Their Journeys Home’. Among other things, the latest report states that nearly four-fifth of migrant workers (out of 5,911) who called SWAN volunteers for help (altogether 821 distress calls were made)...
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