With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-Hindustan Times The nuns’ congregation belongs to Syro-Malabar Church which is based in Kerala. Thiruvananthapuram: The brief detention of a group of nuns by Government Railway Police (GRP) following complaints of alleged forced conversion by Bajrang Dal activists in Uttar Pradesh’s Jhansi district has generated a political firestorm in Kerala ahead of the crucial assembly elections next month. The nuns’ congregation belongs to Syro-Malabar Church which is based in Kerala. While the Kerala Catholic...

-The Telegraph Panel blames speeches by BJP leaders The Delhi Minorities Commission has accused Union home minister Amit Shah, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath and other BJP politicians of “fanning communal sentiments” through incendiary speeches before the February riots in the capital. It has also alleged that “police were complicit and abetted the attacks” during the riots, which killed 53 people, and arrested victims rather than the people they accused. One of the key...

Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...

-The Indian Express Census 2011 counted 14.2 crore migrants in the decade preceding it, intra-district to inter-state. Women moved for marriage, men for work, economic reforms drove the change, and Surat emerged as No. 3 destination while Chennai fell far behind. In a country with a long and often violent history of sons-of-the-soil politics, migration is a politically fraught issue. From the attacks on south Indians in Mumbai in the 1960s...