-HowIndiaLives.com * From high vacancies to shorter tenures to rising pendency, the Central Information Commission (CIC), India’s right-to-information (RTI) appeals body faces a plethora of problems today From almost always having a head to being headless. From five-year terms for key staff to three-year terms. From rules that didn’t leave room for interpretation to an overriding provision for the government. From hardly ever rejecting applications on the grounds of documentation to doing...

-The Hindu Apex court lays down guidelines for matrimonial cases. The Supreme Court on November 4 held that deserted wives and children are entitled to alimony/maintenance from the husbands from the date they apply for it in a court of law. In a significant judgment by a Bench of Justices Indu Malhotra and R. Subhash Reddy, the top court said women deserted by husbands were left in dire straits, often reduced to destitution,...

-Down to Earth These cities would have to build ‘resilience’ if they were to manage such scarcity, the nonprofit said A hundred cities worldwide, including 30 in India, face the risk of ‘severe water scarcity’ by 2050, according to a recent report by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) The cities would face a ‘grave water risk’ by 2050 due to a dramatic increase in their population percentage to 51 per cent by...

-Newsclick.in Double digit jobless rate, crashing women’s employment and absolute fall in number of employed have left people in th state devastated – and furious. Unemployment, it is often said, is death by a thousand cuts. It pushes families into hunger, snatches away children’s education, prevents medical care, and propels people into debt. And, if you are already poor and disadvantaged and living on the edge, unemployment is like a death sentence. A...

-NetworkIdeas.org The International Labour Organization (ILO) has for some months been bringing out a report that monitors the impact of the pandemic on the world economy, especially the labour-hours lost because of the lockdown and their ramifications. The statistics it provides are not compilations of official data from different countries; they are based on the ILO’s own estimates made with whatever information is available from these countries. One cannot say how...