There has been a gross simplification of the issues involved in the exposures in the Radia tapes on the lack of integrity among mediapersons. In order to understand how exactly journalists really function it is necessary to understand the overall context in which they operate and clarify some of the persistent myths about what the profession is all about. Four myths in particular need to be dissected: That it enjoins...

Janhit Abhiyan, an umbrella group of professors, writers, filmmakers, journalists and social justice proponents, has, in a statement, denounced the campaign against caste-based census by “a section of intellectuals and media,” and said this amounted to undermining the consensus arrived at in Parliament. The statement was signed among others by Prof. Tulsiram and Prof. Chamanlal of the Jawaharlal Nehru University; writers Surendra Mohan, Sheeba Aslam Fahmi , Umrao Singh Jatav and...

It is well known that Amartya Sen is the greatest economist that India has ever produced. His credentials were well established even before he got the Nobel Prize. With his latest book — The Idea of Justice — he has also established himself as a world-class moral philosopher who could come up with great abstractions and generalisations that no other Indian thinker could achieve earlier. The Indian academia, so far, has...

KEY TRENDS  • The new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million @* • The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the...