-TheIndiaForum.in Stagnant government funding and mis-allocation of available resources in recent years are together resulting in limited improvements in levels of child nutrition, anaemia and mortality. Last December the results of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) from 2015-16 hit the headlines. And the news was not good. In a world where children mattered, the logical outcome would have been for the government to course correct in the budget to be presented...
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MSP -- the factoids versus the facts -Reetika Khera, Sudha Narayanan and Prankur Gupta
-The Hindu The debate on agricultural issues must take into account the changed geography of procurement and the seller’s profile According to one definition, a factoid is “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”. After the passage of the three controversial farm laws, the Minimum Support Price (MSP) — not mentioned in the laws — has gained a lot of attention....
More »Can the right to work be made real in India? -G Sampath
-The Hindu It can be made workable if there is political will and fiscal resources As economies around the world struggle to recover from the double whammy of a pandemic and a lockdown, unemployment is soaring. In India, the land of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the promise of jobs and the politics of unemployment have a long history. Can a citizen demand work as a right, and...
More »Women do most of the heavy lifting in Indian households: NSO report -Abhishek Jha
-Hindustan Times An average Indian woman spends 19.5% of her time engaged in either unpaid domestic work or unpaid care-giving services, according to the survey conducted between January and December 2019. A first-of-its-kind National Statistical Office (NSO) report released on Tuesday puts numbers to a well known fact -- that Indian women bear the brunt of household work and domestic chores. According to the report, the average Indian woman spends 243 minutes, a...
More »The pandemic is about eyes shut -Rajendran Narayanan
-The Hindu There is a resonance between Saramago’s literary world and the migrant labour distress in contemporary India The novel, Blindness, by Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago, is strikingly prescient about a sweeping illness. The plot revolves around a mysterious epidemic because of which people suddenly turn blind. The thread It starts with a person driving his car who turns blind while waiting at a traffic signal. He pleads to be taken home and...
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