In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...
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Forest fires have become more frequent this year as compared to the past
Forest fires are not just confined to countries like the United States of America (California, 2020), Brazil (Amazon forest, 2019-2020) or Australia (2019-20); they happen every year across many states in India too. Media reports suggest that forest fires have taken place in the recent months in Odisha's Simlipal National Park, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, among other states. Forest fires have also been reported this year in Nagaland-Manipur border (Dzukou...
More »A changing fiscal framework -Dipankar Dasgupta
-The Hindu The government’s announced fiscal policy stance and the fiscal regime it is running seem contradictory There used to be a time — and this was well before India began to globalise — when each Union Budget announced sales tax increases on tobacco products, especially Cigarettes. The demand for Cigarettes being somewhat inelastic, the rise in tax was expected to be a shot in the arm for the revenue-starved government of...
More »Why We Already Know the Rishi Ganga Flood Was a ‘Sooner or Later’ Event -CP Rajendran
-TheWire.in There should be no doubt that the Chamoli disaster is a sign of our misguided developmental priorities and proves our inability to sustainably develop ecologically sensitive zones. In 2019, a petitioner from a village named Reni, in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, had filed a public interest petition at the Uttarakhand high court. Kundan Singh’s charge was that the Rishi Ganga Power Project, set up near the village in 2005, was resorting to environmentally...
More »Size of the population susceptible to coronavirus infection is significant
Between 25th and 30th of March, 2020, the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in India has more than doubled i.e. from 519 to 1,251, according to the data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW). In a span of 6 days, the total number of deaths from COVID-19 has more than trebled i.e. from 9 to 32. In a health situation like this, when the coronavirus...
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