-NDTV Parliament Monsoon Session: The session will have Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha working in separate shifts and there will be special seating for MPs to ensure distancing. New Delhi: The traditional all-party meet before a parliament session has been scrapped for the monsoon session, which begins tomorrow. The departure from convention - probably a first in two decades -- is seen as indication of the growing differences between the opposition and...

ActionAid Association's (AAA) national level survey among people dependent on the informal economy during the third phase of the national lockdown towards the end of May 2020 (i.e. between May 14th and May 22nd, 2020) has documented the "nature and extent of the transitions in the lives and livelihoods of informal workers, including migrant workers, during the pandemic and provide[s] an insight into the precarity they experience and the coping...

-Newsclick.in Among the total respondents, 15% are from scheduled tribes and 39% are scheduled castes, which is higher than their proportion in the country’s population. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the workers, especially in the informal sector, into a deep crisis. A recent report “Workers in the Time of COVID-19" on informal workers says that more than 78% of workers have lost their livelihoods since the pandemic-induced lockdown. The survey by ActionAid India...

  In the month of June this year, encephalitis related deaths in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district grabbed the headlines. Actually, most of the children, who were admitted or died at Shri Krishna Medical College and Hospital (SKMCH), hailed from East Champaran, Vaishali, Sitamarhi and Samastipur apart from Muzaffarpur. Unfortunately, till recently official data on the number of cases and deaths related to Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) was unavailable for...

-National Herald Agriculture, food and trade policy expert Devinder Sharma writes: “My understanding is that only agriculture can reboot the economy, sustain millions of livelihoods, and reduce global warming.” At a time when Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says that neo-liberalism is ‘dead and buried’, and the world as a result is increasingly grappling with the gigantic problems of rising unemployment, gnawing inequality and climatic change reaching a tripping point, agriculture alone has...