-The Telegraph India spends only 0.04 per cent of its GDP on social security Pension; several states add to the Pension from their own funds Sulochana Behera eagerly waits for her old-age Pension of Rs 500 every month at her home in Garh Nipania village in Puri district, Odisha. Within hours of receiving the sum, the widowed Sulochana spends it all on medicine and food that barely last a week. She then starts...

-Newsclick.in Pinarayi Vijayan’s government is supplying food kits and distributing social security Pension to ensure no one remains hungry or destitute The Left Democratic Front (LDF) government is supplying food kits and distributing social security Pension as celebrations for the harvest festival of Onam, which falls on August 21, have already started. Despite the Opposition’s criticism of these measures in the light of the daily spike in Covid cases, the Pinarayi Vijayan government...

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...

-The Hindu Bar on government jobs and welfare benefits for those who have more children. The Uttar Pradesh State Law Commission has prepared a proposed draft Bill for population control, under which a two-child norm will be implemented and promoted. After the law comes into force, a person with more than two children will be debarred from several benefits such as government-sponsored welfare schemes and from contesting elections to the local authority or...

-The Hindu Business Line The development economist, now part of Tamil Nadu’s Economic Advisory Council, says that public expenditure on health is just 0.6 per cent of the state domestic product, one of the lowest ratios among Indian states * Universal quality education, health care and social security are still distant goals * A well-designed system of emergency cash transfers would be quite useful in this situation of recurrent crises, which may last...