-Newsclick.in Maharashtra reopened schools on January 21 after waning of the third wave. It was expected that the mid-day meal scheme would be immediately resumed. But, students continue to be deprived of meals in schools as the scheme is still not functional. Since the graph of the third wave of COVID-19 started going down from January first week, the Maharashtra government allowed the opening of various institutions one by one. The last...

-Press release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha dated 30 January, 2022 The stress on the economy became evident, especially in the aftermath of the raging pandemic from the 7.3% contraction in GDP in 2020-21. The distress faced by poorer households has continued over a period of time with the pandemic acting as a catalyst in increasing the woes of such households. In a latest round of survey conducted by People’s Research on...

-The Telegraph The police as the arbiters of communication For a country with serious challenges to tackle, the amount of time and energy of government agencies and courts that is now spent on offence-taking and conspiracy-chasing borders on the ludicrous. Through 2021, the police in various parts of the country sought to criminalize news gathering as well as social media expressions, registering first information reports indiscriminately under various sections of the Criminal...

-Deccan Herald Politicians may not agree with any data put out by non-government agencies but.. The word ‘data’ has Latin origins. As Jer Thorp writes in Living in Data: “It first appeared in the English language on loan from Latin, where it meant “a thing given, a gift delivered or sent”. In its early usage, the giver of data was the almighty god and hence, it carried a “particular strength of truth”.  Data...

-The Hindu Business Line At present, panchayats make no contribution to the design of schemes. Their autonomy is negligible. This needs to change Decentralisation has long been recognised as an efficient instrument for promoting economic democracy, and delivering services to meet the needs of people. There are three different channels for decentralisation — political, administrative and fiscal. Political decentralisation promotes trust and cooperation between government agencies and citizens. Administrative decentralisation enables authority...