-IndiaSpend.com As researchers caution against declaring India's second COVID-19 wave to be less deadly than the first, we look for clues in excess mortality data from Kerala and Mumbai to shed light on India's comparatively low COVID-19 mortality Chennai: More than one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, India is beginning to take the first steps towards answering a key question--is there something unusual about COVID-19 mortality in India? Mortality is at the...

-The Hindu There are many ways in which women’s burden at home can be reduced by the government Women everywhere carry a disproportionately higher burden of unpaid work, namely, unpaid domestic services as well as unpaid care of children, the old and the disabled for their respective households. Though this work contributes to overall well-being at the household level and collectively at the national level, it is invisible in the national database...

-The Indian Express Amid recent questions about the ECI’s autonomy, a look at how the body has steered India’s electoral history. On March 15, the Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE), chaired by retired Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur, which examines critical aspects of conducting elections, released the second part of its report. Titled “An Inquiry into India’s Election System,” the report evaluated the integrity and inclusiveness of the electoral rolls, increasing...

-The Hindu Inefficiencies in the Aadhaar project should not come in the way of welfare delivery The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, did the right thing by terming as serious the allegation by a petitioner that three crore ration cards were cancelled for not being linked with the Aadhaar database and that these were connected to reported starvation deaths in some States. The unique identification scheme has been in existence for more than...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...