-The Wire Science There is reason to celebrate the drop of India’s maternal mortality rate: the decline is consistent and continuous, indicating that the reproductive health of India’s women is getting better. However, a closer look at the state-level MMR data reveals that the all-India three-year average of maternal deaths camouflages the performance of some states. We can predict that the Empowered Action Group states and Assam will have to redouble their...

-ThePrint.in GST was supposed to create a unified market. The opposite is happening with small businesses being harassed with invoice and payments. The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax or GST was supposed to create a unified market of 1.4 billion people and encourage entrepreneurship and job creation. The other aim was to bring more and more firms into the formal sector of India’s economy, which will help expand the tax...

-Article-14.com India’s 380 million informal workers will be registered on a new database that will allow, says the government, social security payments. It isn’t working as it should because the government insists on Aadhaar, which many workers do not have. Others do not know of it, and if they do, may not be digitally literate, and it isn’t clear what entitlements will follow for workers whose data are being collected. New Delhi:...

-FinancialExpress.com Recent registrations cited as proof of job creation were mostly formalisation of existing jobs Defending the Centre’s record on employment, prime minister Narendra Modi, in a speech in Rajya Sabha, talked about the impressive net enrolment to Employment Provident Fund Organization (EPFO): during 2021, 1.20 crore beneficiaries were enrolled under EPF—about 65 lakh beneficiaries in the 18-25 age bracket, implying they are first-time entrants to the labour market. He connected the...

-The Telegraph The police as the arbiters of communication For a country with serious challenges to tackle, the amount of time and energy of government agencies and courts that is now spent on offence-taking and conspiracy-chasing borders on the ludicrous. Through 2021, the police in various parts of the country sought to criminalize news gathering as well as social media expressions, registering first information reports indiscriminately under various sections of the Criminal...