-The Indian Express Each sex worker will receive Rs 5,000 per month along with three kg of wheat and two kg of rice. Mumbai: To cope with the effects of the lockdown, the Maharashtra Government has decided to give financial aid and 5-kg ration to 5,600 sex workers of Mumbai every month till the Covid-19 pandemic is over. But even as Maharashtra became the first state in October to issue a Government resolution...

-Business Standard The tentative data sourced from the GKRA website shows that since June, around 1.10 million works have been completed under the campaign. Much of the Rs 10,000-crore extra allocation for the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan (GKRA), an employment scheme for migrants thrown adrift by the sudden lockdown in March, will be spent on works done through the flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and rural housing project....

-Hindustan Times Paharganj, once a bustling, thriving market whose entire economy depends on foreign tourists, is a microcosm of the devastation caused by the ongoing coronavirus crisis in the capital’s tourism sector. Satyam Bhatnagar runs a handicrafts shop in Paharganj’s main bazar, a backpackers’ paradise that boasts of hundreds of touristy establishments such as money changers, hotels, rooftop restaurants, tour operators, and handicrafts shops selling a range of stone and wood sculptures,...

-Newsclick.in The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008 (UWSSA) rightly conceives a “decentralised registration model” at the local levels with the help of the Workers’ Facilitation Centres (WFCs). Unimaginative and obscure rulemaking will make it difficult for workers to access benefits that the law entitles them to, argues Dr. K R Shyam Sundar. The Government has endorsed the unjustified stinker of a tag of “Inspector-Raj”, crowned by the business class to labour and...

-IndiaSpend.com Chennai: About 10 months, nine million cases and over 130,000 deaths later, India does not yet know enough about why the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 affected whom it did, and how it did that. There is wide variation in the spread of COVID-19 between states. Areas with higher population density are expected to have more cases, but varying testing rates could be affecting case detection. While the elderly and those...