-TheWire.in While employment was hit harder in urban areas due to the extent of disruption to urban business by the national lockdowns, rural India saw a more unequal distribution of these effects due to high discrimination. In the first article in this two-part series, we looked at the findings on discrimination in India’s labour market detailed in Oxfam’s India Discrimination Report 2022.  While that article detailed the extent of discrimination faced by Muslims,...

-Hindustan Times During the Covid pandemic-induced lockdown in early 2020, nearly 25,000 migrant workers reached Saharanpur on bicycles while heading back to their native places in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from their places of work in Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Meerut: The Saharanpur district administration has auctioned 5,400 bicycles left behind by migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar while rushing home during the Nationwide Lockdown in the wake of...

A recently released study, which has been done by Dalberg in collaboration with Kantar, and with support from the Omidyar Network India, brings to light both the supply and demand-side perspectives on the 'One Nation One Ration Card' (ONORC) scheme. Titled 'Fulfilling the promise of One Nation One Ration Card: A frontline perspective from 5 Indian states', the survey for the study was conducted in five states i.e., Andhra Pradesh,...

-The Hindu Amidst the scattered experimentation now, the Centre must offer strategic policy guidance for inter-State coordination Only two years ago, in the wake of a Nationwide Lockdown, India was left shocked by the plight of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres, facing hunger, exhaustion and violence, to get to the safety of their home villages. The dire circumstances of the migrants tugged at our collective heartstrings. They became the focus of...

Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...