-Down to Earth Freshwater wildlife down 84%; Latin America, the Caribbean particularly hit The population of vertebrate species declined by around 68 per cent between 1970 and 2016, said the Living Planet Report 2020 released by international non-profit World Wide Fund for Nature September 10, 2020. The Living Planet Index (LPI) — a measure of the state of the world’s biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species in terrestrial, freshwater and...

-Press Note by People's Action for Employment Guarantee dated September 10th, 2020 MGNREGA during the pandemic and beyond: Implementation highlights, concerns and questions and demands for parliamentarians We are confronting an unprecedented crisis in the history of modern India. On the one hand, the increasing number of COVID cases point to a dubious distinction for India on the world stage. On the other hand, the unplanned lockdown has resulted in a massive...

-The Indian Express Each of the poverty alleviation programmes seems to have a recurring theme — being funded by the poor themselves. The rodomontade about heralding a new epoch of prosperity six years ago is gradually evaporating. It appears the PM is in the dark about the delivery of his government’s policies, just as the Congress leadership seems clueless about issues on the ground. Four specific pain points unmask the gap between...

-The Telegraph The economic distress caused by unilaterally imposed lockdowns has brought the focus back on the rural job programme Narendra Modi’s cocky statement in Parliament in 2015 about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act being a monumental failure of the Congress regime may have been a political jibe, but it showed that the government had no intention of boosting a programme which, since its inception, has suffered from the...

-TheFederal.com It has no meaningful relationship to actual economic performances of states, has become a tool for govt to push through contentious reforms India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry has released the ranking of States based on the implementation of the “Business Reform Action Plan” (BRAP) for 2019. The BRAP is a set of reform points for States, released by the central government. Relative levels of success in the implementation of BRAP...