-Newsclick.in Even if the wage rates under MGNREGA are doubled and if jobs are provided for at least 100 days in a year as per the law, the extra expenditure would not exceed 1% of GDP. The growth rate is slowing down in India neither because of lower productivity of the labourers or that of the land, nor because of shortage of labour or productive capacity, but because of the lack of...

-Newsclick.in NSSO, Livestock Census, NCRB, even Census data, are slowly getting strangled by delays but more so by wilful omissions of parts. In the past five and a half years, several key data releases have been excised, mangled, delayed or even suppressed. Since these are all generated, collated and processed by dedicated departments of the central government, it is not a leap of imagination that there is some deliberate intent behind this. Stray...

-Newsclick.in Children go hungry in India while granaries overflow and corporates get mega tax-breaks. As a child, I never liked eating liver. I would gaze at my plate for ages, as I sat ruminating at the table, well after everyone else had finished their meals. “You are wasting your food,” my mother would scold me, “while children in Ethiopia are dying of hunger.” I am not alone. Almost all of us would...

-Newsclick.in Glyphosate use exposes India’s broken pesticide-herbicide regulations. Glyphosate has been in the news in the past few months for all the wrong reasons. In three separate verdicts in California, courts have held the herbicide responsible for causing cancer. In the latest case, the jury has awarded more than $2 billion to a couple who claimed that exposure to glyphosate triggered their cancer. These cases mark the first time that citizens have successfully...

-Newsclick.in The labourers from Dang migrate every year to Bardoli—a hub of sugar mills—where they are caught in a system of advance payments that bind them to the workplace for the duration of the season. Dang, a district in southern Gujarat, is witnessing one of the largest labour movements in its recent history after the tribal sugarcane harvesters of the district decided not to migrate to Bardoli and other neighbouring areas. Bardoli,...