-The Hindu In the week of the survey in September, about one in three rural children had done no learning activity at all. About 20% of rural children have no textbooks at home, according to the Annual State of Education Report (ASER) survey conducted in September, the sixth month of school closures due to COVID-19 across the country. In Andhra Pradesh, less than 35% of children had textbooks, and only 60% had...

Multidimensional poverty is about non-monetary poverty and is strongly associated with the challenges of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although previously defined only in monetary terms, poverty is now understood to include the lived reality of people’s experiences and the multiple deprivations they face. India’s multidimensional headcount ratio (H) i.e. the proportion or incidence of people (within a given population) who experience multiple deprivations has reduced from 55.1 percent to...

-TheThirdPole.net Over thirty years since high levels of arsenic was found in groundwater in West Bengal, little has been done to avert a slow-burn health crisis In the Indo-Gangetic plains, there are many widow-villages where the men have died from drinking water laced with arsenic. Women often come to the area to marry and so are only affected later in life. In India, over one million people have died in the last...

-Livemint.com Government data claims that more than 10 million people went home after the lockdown, although experts and civil society groups say the number is much larger. Migrants who went home during the lockdown saw their incomes drop by as much as 94% and an overwhelming majority of them are ready to return to the cities, a survey by a team of retired government officers and academics found. The survey on covid’s impact...

-The Telegraph The move is likely to settle the citizenship problem of lakhs of people who crossed over to Bengal from neighbouring Bangladesh Calcutta: The Mamata Banerjee government has started regularising refugee colonies on central government land by offering freehold rights to those living on the plots for more than 40 years. The move is likely to settle the citizenship problem of lakhs of people who crossed over to Bengal from neighbouring Bangladesh. During...