Soumendu Barat, postgraduate in history and Bengali Nasima Begum, graduate in economics with diploma in a computer course Sanjay Dutta, postgraduate in Bengali Oct.13: In Calcutta this morning, Soumendu, Nasima and Sanjay were preparing for the biggest gamble of their lives where the chance of success is .004. The jackpot? A Group D government job that will enable them to work as “peon, orderly peon, night guard or darwan”. Joblessness, the curse generations have lived...

Women currently make up around half of the world’s migrant population, even without taking into consideration short-term and seasonal movements. Despite the widespread prevalence of female migration, there are still some common stereotypes about its nature: that it is mostly women and girls accompanying their male heads of household, or dominantly by young, unmarried women, mostly for marriage or for some defined work enabled by contractors. Yet the migration of...

The spectre of inflation has returned to haunt India. It is not even six months since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government returned to power but its inability to control food prices is arguably its single biggest failure till now. The inflation rate will eventually come down sometime in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future and the government will surely take credit for bringing prices down as and when that happens. But...

The Centre, for the first time, has undertaken a nation-wide survey of slums to profile urban household poverty and the nature of jobs held by those living on society's fringes. The survey will profile slum-dwellers by caste and religion "for properly allocating development schemes, policy-making, project formulation and implementation, and monitoring", according to an official at the Union ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation (Hupa). The survey, being conducted under Hupa,...

KEY TRENDS   • As per the 2019 Global Hunger Index report, neighbouring countries such as China (GHI score: 6.5; GHI rank: 25), Sri Lanka (GHI score: 17.1; GHI rank: 66), Myanmar (GHI score: 19.8; GHI rank: 69), Nepal (GHI score: 20.8; GHI rank: 73), Bangladesh (GHI score: 25.8; GHI rank: 88) and Pakistan (GHI score: 28.5; GHI rank: 94) have outperformed India (GHI score: 30.3; GHI rank: 102) *13    • As per the 2018 Global Hunger Index report,...