-The Hindu Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey speak about the MKSS experience and their campaign for citizen-centric accountability. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan was founded in Bhim on May 1, 1990 with the aim of organising people at the grassroots. By addressing issues of minimum wage and land and reading out official records, thereby exposing the enormous corruption in the system, it mobilised peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. A dharna held...

-The Hindu Death rate in India for working men is far higher The international media has been awash with reports of hundreds of workers, most of them from Nepal, Bangladesh and India, dying during the construction of stadiums and other facilities for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. However a look at migration data suggests that the number of deaths does not necessarily suggest the kind of crisis that is being described. Since Qatar won...

-The Huffington Post India is home to a quarter of world’s 794.6 million hungry people, and it has more undernourished people than China, according to the State of Food Insecurity in the World published by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), this week. The report finds that India has 194.6 million undernourished people, down from 210.1 million in 1990-1992, which constitute 15.2 percent of its population in 2014-2016. China has 133.8 million...

-Down to Earth Telangana and Andhra Pradesh could take cue from the state government on reducing number of heat stroke deaths In May, 1998 when I was travelling in Odisha, hospitals reported 2,042 deaths due to heat stroke across the state, right from the coastal cities to western regions. A doctor posted at a government hospital in the coastal town of Kendrapara said, “I have counted more deaths than births in a week....

-The Hindu The Modi government is determined to dismantle the two-pronged welfare paradigm. It is now an established fact that one area where the Narendra Modi administration has acted with a sense of purpose, urgency and resolve is in slashing social expenditure. Be it education, health, agriculture, livelihood security, food security, panchayati raj institutions, drinking water or the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plan, central government funds earmarked for social protection have been cut. The...