-The Hindu The Government needs to reverse its neglect and policy missteps as key indicators show the sector has resilience The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic could be slowly receding with a decline in the official estimates of daily infections and deaths. The economy is also very gradually getting back to normal, with many States beginning to ease some of the restrictions imposed in their lockdowns. However, the challenge of an...

-The Hindu Remigration of young, trained workers Bihar, Jharkhand workers at minimal levels A survey of young, semi-skilled migrants from rural Bihar and Jharkhand in April 2021 has found that last year’s lockdown led to an informalisation of labour among men, while most of the women simply dropped out of the work force altogether. It also found that the number of out-of-State migrants halved between March 2020 and 2021, with no net effect...

In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...

-The Hindu Centre urges States to issue more ration cards to vulnerable. Almost a third of all ration card holders are yet to get their free foodgrains allocation for May under the Centre’s COVID-19 relief scheme, according to the Food Ministry. At a press conference on Thursday, Food Secretary Sudhanshu Pandey also said it was up to the States to take further action on providing rations to migrants and others without ration...

-The Hindu In the U.S., India and Brazil, messianic populism, polarisation and insularity have made the pandemic that much worse A year and counting into the greatest health crisis the world has faced in over a century we can identify one overwhelming factor that separates the countries that have done relatively well from those that have been complete disasters:Autocrcy elected autocrats. By any measure the most dismal performers in the democratic world...