-Scroll.in Two labourers died of suspected pesticide poisoning in Kuttanad, the state’s rice bowl, in January. On the morning of January 17, KK Sanal Kumar strapped a motorised sprayer onto his back and left for a paddy field near his home in Peringara gram panchayat of Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district. The owners of the field, Unnikrishnan and Sanil, gave him several bottles of the highly hazardous pesticide Viraat to spray on their 40-day-old...

-The Hindu Important bills were passed; but going forward there must be debate on the anti-defection law The 16th Lok Sabha had its final sitting last Wednesday, marking an end to a disappointing five-year period. This Lok Sabha was surpassed only by the preceding one in terms of the low number of hours it worked. It met for 1,615 hours, 40% lower than all full-term Parliaments. This shows a decline in the...

-The Hindu India’s labour participation rate, very low by world standards, fell sharply after demonetisation. Women bore the brunt Monthly measurement of the unemployment rate is one of the requirements of the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The SDDS — India was one of the early signatories —was established in 1996 to help countries access the international capital markets by providing adequate economic and financial information...

-The Hindu Business Line Sociologist Dipankar Gupta discusses the dynamics of political mobilisation and the politics of reservation. Excerpts from an interview to Poornima Joshi: * The Indian state’s failure to provide the basics — universal education and healthcare — has never become the rallying point for political mobilisation. Why is that? The more cleavages of class, caste, language, race a society has, the more difficult it is to practise democracy. Democracy works...

-The Indian Express Repeated government interventions in official data release run the risk of denting market trust in it The controversy over two top functionaries of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigning in protest over the NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) withholding its new employment survey adds to a growing list of government interventions in data releases. There is a common theme — the government is seen to take an adversarial...