-TheWire.in As gaping holes emerge in the Delhi Corona Sahayata Yojana, daily wage earners remain unpaid, hungry and helpless. New Delhi: A month ago, on April 7, Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde asked public interest lawyer Prashant Bhushan: “If they are being provided meals, then why do they need money for meals?” Bhushan had represented a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed jointly by civil rights activists Harsh Mander and Anjali Bharadwaj to...

-Scroll.in Gestures should not come at the cost of real action. When Narendra Modi announced India’s harsh lockdown starting from March 25 to combat the spread the coronavirus, migrant workers were the worst affected group. Stranded in cities without wages or access to food, hundreds of thousands of people started walking, cycling and smuggling themselves in container trucks and cement mixers to try to get home – a journey that was sometimes...

-Scroll.in It is imperative that this money is reclaimed and not treated as an unavoidable collateral loss in the fight against Covid-19. On March 25, my colleagues and I at the Aajeevika Bureau, which tries to address the economic and socio-legal problems of migrant workers in Gujarat and Rajasthan, woke up to dozens of messages of utter distress, both on our personal phones and on our toll-free Labour Line. Among the people who...

-NDTV "I have a one-year-old baby and no money to even buy milk," said an aggrieved Krishna Mandal. Krishna, from Jharkhand, has been working as a daily wage factory worker in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu. He hasn't been paid since the lockdown began. Pampi Kumari and her husband from Bihar work as daily wage labourers in Gurugram, Haryana. She worked in a medical supplies company while her husband worked as a construction...

-The Hindu Low allocations and specific policy statements point to greater privatisation and withdrawal of the state Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman began her speech by saying that the Union Budget was “woven around three prominent themes” — aspirational India, economic development for all and building a caring society. Achieving any of these would require extraordinary efforts on the social sector front starting with allocating additional resources for health, education, nutrition, employment...