-The New Indian Express First, existing studies have analysed the intensity of farmer suicides in isolation, i.e. without comparing farmer suicides with those by other professionals. Farmer suicides have always been a highly debated issue in the public discourse on agriculture sector performance in India. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, 3,58,164 people engaged in the farming profession have committed suicide in India from 1995 to 2019. Though these numbers...

Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-The Hindu Limited impact in western Uttar Pradesh’s sugarcane belt After attracting thousands of farmers from Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to join a year-long agitation, farm union leaders were largely unable to leverage that mass support to tilt the results in the Assembly polls.  In Punjab, the union leaders who fought the elections are set to lose their deposits. In U.P., where the wider Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) platform campaigned against the BJP...

-Press release by the Right to Food Campaign Secretariat dated February 23, 2022 * 66 percent respondents said that their income has decreased compared to the pre-pandemic period * 80 percent reported some form of food insecurity, 25 percent reported severe food insecurity * 41 percent said that nutritional quality of their diet deteriorated compared to the pre-pandemic period * 67 percent could not afford cooking gas in the month preceding the survey. * 45...