-The Hindu In their response to the pandemic, countries have hardly evinced concern about the health and well-being of workers The coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease is the first neoliberal virus in the world. To say so is not to reduce its dangers — particularly to the already vulnerable, such as the old, the ill or the poor (who cannot isolate without starving) — but to criticise how it has been...

-The Hindu I request you to consider advising the State Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Boards to roll out emergency welfare measures, particularly wage support, to construction workers who are in distress, she says Congress president Sonia Gandhi has asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to roll out emergency welfare measures for construction industry workers because of the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown, the party said on Tuesday. In her letter, dated March 23, Ms....

After the outbreak of COVID-19 in China during early January this year and its dissemination globally within a few days, health experts have suggested ways to check its spread exponentially among the rest of the population. In the age of internet connectivity, work-from-home and self-isolation have been advised as solutions to ensure social distancing and avoid large-scale social gatherings. Experts have asked governments and private enterprises to keep people at...

-The Indian Express Some fear such a census will “further marginalise” the descendants of Bengali-speaking migrants in Assam Guwahati: Assam’s Welfare of Minorities Minister Ranjit Dutta has confirmed the state’s plans to implement a census to identify Assam’s ‘khilonjiya’, or indigenous Muslim population, this year. On Tuesday, Dutta will meet with various representatives of the indigenous Assamese Muslim community to seek their “suggestions” in finalising the framework of the census. “A sum of...

-The Hindu Shanti Devi, a 70-year-old widow, spends her days cleaning houses in Okhla to earn a meagre sum as she has not got her government pension for over two years. “I went to the social welfare office. I showed them my passbook, my Aadhaar card, but they just gave me a slip saying my pension has been stopped and told me to approach the local MLA,” she says, pulling a...