-TheIndiaForum.in Aprajita Sarcar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi. She works on histories of reproductive technology, population control and their links to urbanisation in India. India’s family planning programme advertised the small middle-class family as a means to develop the nation. But its top-down approach meant that sterilisations became the default contraceptive option for poor and working class women. This legacy persists. In a letter to the...

-The Hindu Contrary to expectations, the BJP’s appeal among backward classes and the rural poor has petered out The phrase ‘subaltern Hindutva’ was bandied about quite a lot in academic and journalistic circles during the recently concluded West Bengal Assembly election. Many journalists and scholars covering stories from the field had a common account, that a large section of rural poor, backward classes, Dalits and Adivasis had firmly shifted towards the Bharatiya...

-The Hindu She stresses on the protection that vaccines can offer against disease The current COVID-19 surge in India may begin to start tapering between the middle and end of May, virologist Gagandeep Kang said on Wednesday. At a virtual interaction with members of the Indian Women Press Corps, Dr. Kang said, “Best guess estimates from a number of models put this somewhere between the middle and end of the month. Some models...

-Livemint.com The health crisis will boost the trend of India’s well-off opting out to create parallel infrastructure On 2 May, the total number of active covid cases in the country crossed 3.4 million. The number was at 5,80,387 on 31 March, implying a jump of around 488% in a little over a month’s time. Unlike the first wave, this time around the well-to-do middle class has also been heavily impacted by the...

-The Hindu Leveraging existing schemes and providing universal social security is of utmost importance India is one of the largest welfare states in the world and yet, with COVID-19 striking in 2020, the state failed to provide for its most vulnerable citizens. The country witnessed multiple crises: mass inter- and intra-migration, food insecurity, and a crumbling health infrastructure. The extenuating circumstances of the pandemic has pushed an estimated 75 million people into...