-The Indian Express It would have made more sense — economically, legally, politically, morally, constitutionally — to have limited 10 per cent EWS reservation to those with farming or rural backgrounds The last few years have seen the so-called dominant farming communities — especially the Jats, Marathas, Patidars and Kapus — mount violent agitations demanding quotas in government jobs and higher educational institutions, whether under the OBC (Other Backward Class) or...

-Counterview.net A letter, addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and prepared by senior activists led by Aruna Roy on behalf of the Peoples’ Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG), and signed, among others, by 80 members of Parliament, has regretted that, despite repeated public statements by his government promising employment and job creation that will boost the country’s growth, the country’s only employment guarantee programme, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-Newsclick.in Casual and contract workers’ proportion to regular workers has gone up to a record 53%. Nearly 2.4 lakh workers of government-run public enterprises have lost their jobs since the Narendra Modi led BJP government took power in 2014. That’s a Massive 25 per cent of the workforce. Simultaneously, the number of casual and contract workers has increased to 3.8 lakh. The proportion of such employees has zoomed up from just 36%...

-Livemint.com All recent reforms mooted on farm credit do not address the needs of farmers for whom formal credit doors are shut Farm distress has been a sadly persistent feature for the past five years, the initial two years on account of failed rains, but in the last three years because of policy failure on a number of fronts, including, most visibly, unremunerative prices for farm produce. That it shapes electoral...

-Scroll.in Instead, for a start, we should allow forests to regrow naturally. Planting trees creates a plantation, not a forest. India is again wasting valuable time, effort and resources on a national scale as it races to forestall an impending water crisis. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is conducting Massive afforestation drives, planting native species. But a forest is a self-sown, self-regenerating community of plants and dependent organisms, from...