-TheWire.in The re-conceptualisation of sex work as a form of sexual labour will increase sex workers’ accessibility to resources, mobilise them for representation and participation, and challenge social exclusion. One of the most unsettling debates in contemporary India has been on sex markets and sex work. Stemming from obscurantist sexual moorings of orthodoxy, the public impulse has been fragmentary. The premise underlying the internal contradiction is the delusive alienation of labour and sex. There...

Scientific knowledge has immensely helped in combating the dreadful coronavirus and its spread. Within a record short period of time, scientists (including virologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, etc.) and their research outputs helped the commoners to learn more about the SARS-CoV-2 and how it spreads from one individual to the next one. Common people have now come to know how simple techniques and behavioural change like the wearing of N95 masks, maintaining...

-The Hindu Gross domestic expenditure on research has stayed at 0.7% of the GDP for years While India has made ‘solid progress’ towards the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets concerning industry, infrastructure and innovation, the country’s investment in research remains unsatisfactory, the UNESCO Science Report has observed. The gross domestic expenditure on research (GERD) has been stagnant at 0.7% of the GDP for years, although, in absolute terms, research expenditure has increased, the...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-The Hindu   Even after five decades of feminism and female participation in the productive economy, the problem of women falling off the organised workforce remains a global phenomenon Former Lehman Brothers Chief Financial Officer Erin Callan recently urged women not to work too hard at their professions. Her comments in The New York Times about the dangers of losing the work-life balance came on the eve of the publication of Facebook COO...