-The Hindu The case for reservations for women and transgender persons in State jobs and higher education The Bihar government recently announced 33% horizontal reservation for women in State engineering and medical colleges. While reservation for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) is referred to as vertical reservation, horizontal reservation refers to the equal opportunity provided to other categories of beneficiaries, such as...

-The Telegraph Trying to make labour force survey results look artificially attractive by the government may only be an attempt at self-deception  The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey data for July 2019 to June 2020 released by the Central government shows a rise in the labour force participation rate and a fall in the unemployment rate even when the economy registered a sharp deceleration in the rate of growth. This is surprising...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-IndiaSpend.com Health data relating to 2020-21 and April-May 2021 in the National Health Mission's Health Management Information System showed a spike in unexplained mortality in rural areas, and disruptions in India's routine immunisations during the Covid-19 pandemic Chennai: Key official health data that pointed to excess mortality and disrupted health services during the Covid-19 pandemic have suddenly gone offline, an IndiaSpend investigation shows. While government officials say that the reason for the...

-Scroll.in India runs massive policy programs based on caste. Yet refuses to collect data on them. This paradox means the government is working blind. On July 20, the Modi government told Parliament that it had decided to not conduct a caste census. The only caste-wise data the next census would collate would be on Dalits and Adivasis, the same as every census in independent India’s history. India’s largest caste bloc – the...