The Union Budget 2020-21, which was presented by the Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman on 1st February, 2020 has failed to impress civil society Activists and farmers' rights groups (click here  and here). Through their press releases and notes, members of CSOs were demanding as well as suggesting the Union Government for hiking the budgetary allocation for schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and Pradhan Mantri...

-The Hindu ‘Barefoot College’s archives bear testimony to Ms. Lindsay’s methodical and painstaking work’ Manya Jayaram Lindsay, younger sister of social Activist Aruna Roy, died in Hitchin, U.K., after suffering from cancer in recent years. She had set up the preventive and curative health structure at the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), Tilonia — widely known as the Barefoot College — and studied indigenous people in the U.S. and Australia, and...

-The Hindu For the first time, the Muslim community is asserting its religious identity as well as its Indian identity, says the IAS officer who quit office to protest the J&K lockdown Kannan Gopinathan, the former IAS officer, first caught the nation’s eye when he stepped down from the service to protest the lockdown in Jammu and Kashmir. He resigned as secretary, power department of the Union Territories of Daman and Diu,...

-Down to Earth This comes even as rural India is suffering its worst unemployment crisis in 45 years The Union government slashed budgetary allocation for its flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Generation Act (MGNREGA) in the Budget 2020-21, at a time when rural India is facing all sorts of crises including rising food bills and highest unemployment in the last five decades MGNREGA guarantees at least 100 days of employment to adults...

-Newsclick.in In Maharashtra, most DNTs don’t have houses or villages, no ID cards or birth or land certificates. Not even burial places. Pune: De-notified and nomadic tribes (DNTs), many of whom still don’t have identity cards, are still unaware of CAA, NRC and NPR (Citizenship Amendment Act, National Register of Citizens and National Population Register). But Activists and academicians from the tribes have begun an awareness drive asking them not to submit...