-Down to Earth Mounting expenses, under-provisioning of food subsidy budget leading to a huge debt is highly worrisome A fiscal crisis has been brewing in the last few years. Mounting food subsidy arrears — payable to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) due to ‘under-provisioning’ of food subsidy expenses in successive union budgets — has forced FCI to take loans to finance its operations. FCI is the central agency that manages procurement, storage...

-ThePrint.in In ‘Labouring women’, economist Jayati Ghosh writes about what Indian policymakers are getting wrong in their measure of poverty. Among the various aspects of deprivation related to poverty and inequality, one aspect which has seldom attracted the attention of scholars and policy-makers equally is that of time poverty. Ignoring this important dimension actually results from a related and possibly more substantive deficiency: the inadequate conception of what constitutes work that underlies...

-TheWire.in The Wire travels to the house of the Dalit victim in a village dominated by upper caste Thakur households. Hathras, Uttar Pradesh: For a fortnight, the Dalit gang rape victim from Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district fought for her life. Her limbs were paralysed and her tongue was brutally wounded. Those arrested for the crime were four upper caste Thakur men, Sandeep (20), his uncle Ravi (35) and their friends Luv Kush (23)...

-Hindustan Times An average Indian woman spends 19.5% of her time engaged in either unpaid domestic work or unpaid care-giving services, according to the survey conducted between January and December 2019. A first-of-its-kind National Statistical Office (NSO) report released on Tuesday puts numbers to a well known fact -- that Indian women bear the brunt of household work and domestic chores. According to the report, the average Indian woman spends 243 minutes, a...

-The Indian Express The primary objective of the survey was to measure participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities as well as measure the time dispositions on different activities. Mumbai: A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND ‘Time Use Survey’ conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has shown that only 38.2 per cent of the population participates in “employment and other related activities”, spending 429 minutes (7 hours and 9 minutes)...