The increase in the total number of suicides committed in India during 2020 in comparison to the previous years has hit the headlines recently. While some media commentators have stated that the economic distress (caused by job loss, income loss, failure of business, and growing hunger, among other things) in 2020 could have led to more suicides being committed, others have said that home isolation and deteriorating mental health (associated...

The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...

Remote teaching and learning promoted by Edtech companies as an alternative to physical classrooms, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, may have a sizeable consumer base in our country. However, at the bottom of the pyramid, there are only a few takers of online education. In reality, class and caste-divide, which is more prominent in rural areas, affects access to digital learning. The majority of the school going...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...

-Down to Earth Daniel Swain, a climate scientist from the University of California, Los Angeles, talks about the new science of extreme events attribution The planet is warming as predicted and its impacts are unfolding as laid out. Climate change is real; there is no dispute over it. But can we directly attribute these rising disasters to human-induced climate change? That is the raging scientific question. To answer this, a new stream of...