-Hindustan Times Universalise PDS, make it demand-driven; give more funds to states; and ramp up MGNREGS I pen this column with a depressing sense of deja vu. Back in late March as India went into lockdown, I wrote in these pages of the urgent need for the State to change the rules of the game, avoid red tape, improve Centre-state coordination and adapt agile administrative processes as it sought to provide relief...
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Post-Lockdown, Workers Demand More Work, Better Wages Under Rural Jobs Scheme -Rajat Kumar
-Hindustan Times Dungarpur: India’s rural employment guarantee scheme is falling short in helping residents tide over the economic distress caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown restrictions, data from Rajasthan suggest. Nearly 43% households who took up work under the scheme in Dungarpur, a largely tribal district in southern Rajasthan, had completed more than 50 of their 100 days of work in the first four months of the current financial...
More »How the Supreme Court let down poor workers during the pandemic -Gautam Bhatia
-Hindustan Times By effectively insulating employers from paying wages to workers, it has reinforced an unequal power dynamic The coronavirus pandemic — and the measures taken by the central and state governments to contain it over the last five months — has led to widespread disruption across the country. A substantial part of this disruption is asymmetric in nature; that is, it has disproportionately affected vulnerable and marginalised people, those unable to...
More »Lack of jobs force migrant labourers to return to cities they left in March -Shinjini Ghosh
-The Hindu With few job opportunities in villages, migrant labourers who had left the city in March are returning in droves The Anand Vihar bus terminal — where thousands of Migrant Workers had assembled four months back in a desperate bid to return to their home towns after a nationwide lockdown was announced — is again abuzz with labourers, but this time they are desperate to return to the city. With the lockdown...
More »Myth of the pristine forest -Sharachchandra Lele , Atul Joshi and Purnima Upadhyay
-The Indian Express Hardline conservationists fail to see possibilities of people-wildlife coexistence The COVID-19 pandemic has driven Migrant Workers back to their villages, including many situated inside or on the fringes of forested areas, including sanctuaries and national parks. Even as they seek to remake livelihoods there, a new battle has emerged between the forest department (FD) and these local communities. It pertains to the declaration of a Critical Wildlife Habitat (CWH),...
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