-Livemint.com India’s south and west are now at replacement fertility, but it will be several decades before the country’s population starts shrinking Gujarat has now joined 13 other states at or below replacement fertility, new data from the Sample Registration System (SRS) for 2018 shows. Bihar is now the only Indian state where a woman as of 2018 was likely to have over three children in her lifetime. The SRS is a large-scale...

-Livemint.com From an already low base, women’s employment has fallen further, and a recovery will be difficult A clutch of early studies on the impact of the lockdown on employment is showing that women’s employment could be particularly badly hit. Given India’s record low female workforce participation rates, growing child care demands, and a looming recession, researchers fear that women could be increasingly shut out of the productive economy. To estimate the impact...

-ThePrint.in The response of various Indian states to COVID-19 will differ as the poorest states have the weakest capacity to deliver health services. After the largest single-day increase in the number of novel coronavirus cases in India, it has never been clearer that the pandemic is upon us and the next few weeks are going to throw up a scenario that many still find hard to imagine. From the data we have,...

-The Indian Express A reworking of curriculum and activities is urgently needed for the age band from four to eight. ASER 2019 report underlines this While the importance of good early childhood education has been known for a long time, the draft New Education Policy (released in June 2019) links the “severe learning crisis” to what goes on with young children in India. The voluminous policy document points out that close...

-Livemint.com Document-driven processes such as the proposed National Register of Citizens are likely to place the heaviest burden on Adivasis and Muslims Among the many conceits of the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens is this: that only “illegal immigrants" need fear not having the proper documentation. News reporting from Assam has exposed repeatedly that this is not necessarily the case, with women and the poor bearing the brunt of the National...