-The Hindu There is a collective culpability in the social crime during the lockdown — of the dispossession of India’s working poor The traumatic months of the national lockdown lay bare many troubling truths about the profound estrangement of people of privilege from the working poor. They reveal a society in which the privileged are extraordinarily comfortable with inequality, and wanting in elementary empathy and solidarity. They confirm that the veneer of...

-Hindustan Times Less than 57% of the people who sought work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) have received jobs under the programme. At a time when millions of migrant workers who have returned home to the hinterland are looking towards it for a livelihood, the government’s flagship rural jobs programme has got off to a slow start in the new financial year, government data show, amid the...

-TheWire.in There remains a wide chasm between the financial resources committed in budgets and the actual expenditure aimed at providing social security benefits for workers. The unprecedented crisis that the unplanned lockdown pushed workers into has once again forced social activists and researchers to contemplate over whether a legislation passed in 2008 by parliament could have provided relief to workers. Careful scrutiny of the financial resources as committed in budgets and the actual...

-Outlook India The short-term measures by the government to ensure the immediate safety, food and shelter for the migrants will fail to suffice in the long run as they do nothing to tackle the underlying causes that contribute to the systemic discrimination and deprivation of the migrants. The spread of novel Coronavirus has created its own spectrum of distress and turmoil for individuals across social groups around the world, but more for...

-PTI/ The New Indian Express About 49 per cent of the FPOs surveyed reported a shortage of finance, 11 out of 18 FPOs dealing in vegetable produce reported losses with a reduction of 35 per cent of sales. NEW DELHI: The nationwide coronavirus-induced lockdown has impacted business operations of 67 per cent of the 92 farmer-producer organisations (FPOs) spread across 48 districts of the country, according to a survey. An FPO, formed by...