-TheWire.in No job contract means lower pay and longer hours. In a desperate bid to encourage investment, several states have made sweeping changes to labour laws over the past month. A number of states have extended the maximum daily work hours from NINe to 12, removed the requirement to pay minimum wages, diluted safety norms, restricted the rights of workers to unionise and made it easy for employers to fire workers. While netas...

-The Telegraph How did unorganized labour become invisible? Thanks to a humongous oversight on the part of the government, India’s unorganized labour has suddenly become a vivid, long-runNINg story. Photographers walk with families undertaking unimaginable journeys. Reporters tail them in SUVs. Their faces and daily tragedies have dominated newspaper headlines and television news for two months runNINg, something nobody would have ever thought possible. Since when did hyperventilating news channels focus on...

-TheWire.in The government has failed to provide compensation and relief to farmers for the losses suffered during the lockdown, primarily because it lacks the fiscal space. New Delhi: On Friday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman held her third press conference in as many days to follow up on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of a Rs 20 lakh crore financial stimulus package. After focussing on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), and migrant...

-IndiaSpend.com Chandigarh: With thousands of migrants who had left Uttarakhand for greener pastures returNINg amid the lockdown, the state government is trying to convince them to stay on and rebuild their lives there, offering interest-free loans, subsidies and free electricity to set up eco-tourism and micro-enterprises. The state government has also added an additional budget for employment-generating schemes such as the Veer Chandra Garhwali Yojana, which offers micro credit aimed to...

-The Telegraph A Twitter campaign sends a searing message DocsNeedGear — a campaign on Twitter on the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi called upon Indians to light torches for NINe minutes against Covid-19 on Sunday — tried to drive home the message that doctors fighting the coronavirus pandemic needed protection. “We won’t be safe if our doctors are not safe. Remember everyone,” said a tweet under #DocsNeedGear on Friday. Several Twitter users posted news...