-TheWire.in Ideally, the government should increase the work entitlement for MGNREGA to at least 150 days, double the budget and put in place an urban employment guarantee act. Let’s start with those who did well over the last 10 months. The Sensex index crossed the 50,000 benchmark for the first time on January 21, 2021, with a whopping 70% increase since April 2020. The Oxfam inequality report, just released, gives an idea of...

-Frontline.in Ten million girls in India could drop out of secondary School due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Right to Education Forum policy brief. With 1.6 million girls aged 11 to 14 years currently out of School, the pandemic could disproportionately impact girls further by putting them at risk of early marriage, early pregnancy, poverty, trafficking and violence. Released on January 24, the International Day of Education and National Girl...

-The Indian Express Hypothetically, if Ashok Kumar had been a conductor on any of the other 20 buses except the one the victim travelled in, he would not have even been an accused. On one of these bleak, foggy mornings that make for reflection, my mother wondered aloud how my life might have turned out if we hadn’t moved from Bombay to Delhi when I was a teenager. Not fundamentally differently, I...

-The Hindu Without regulation, the situation could spiral out of control Recently, a professor at a business School allegedly misused his faculty position to provide fake certificates to students whom he had compelled to attend an online course that he taught. He essentially took advantage of India’s rising pre-pandemic gig economy in education. When authorities at the institution discovered the racket, they suspended him. This is a cautionary tale for the global...

-Hindustan Times Recent research at the London School of Economics examines a decade of high-quality farmer-buyer data from Kenya during a period when it introduced radical farm laws to encourage agri-businesses to determine impacts on small farmers In the debate on new farm laws, emotions are running high with concerns that small farmers are being pitted against large agri-businesses. The new laws contain mostly untried policies and it is difficult to gauge...