-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...

-The India Forum The government's lack of respect for national surveys on consumption has meant that the door has been opened to preparation of unofficial estimates on poverty made on questionable assumptions. Two such recent estimates highlight the need to resume collection of data to get a true picture of poverty The government of India does not seem to be interested in knowing how many poor there are in the country. The missing...

-Hindustan Times Almost two and a half years after the 2017-18 Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) was scrapped, the ‘great Indian poverty debate’ seems to have resurrected itself. The second season of this debate, interestingly, has started from Washington DC, not India. Poverty statistics in India have always been the subject of controversy. The country saw a big debate on the trend in poverty and the veracity of poverty estimates in the 2000s....

-Deccan Herald Improving Workforce Participation Unemployment at 7.9%! Many may wonder why so much is made of a ratio that has been hovering between 6% and 8% since 2017. In India, when 7% lose their jobs, it means more than 40 million are without work. In December 2021, the CMIE informed us that 53 million Indians were unemployed. Assuming that each individual supports at least four other dependents in the household, it...

The virility of Muslim men vis-à-vis men from other religious communities have often been used as a political tool and to create a divisive agenda just before elections for getting votes from the majority of the Indian electorate who are Hindus. Instead of focusing on positive agendas like human development, employment generation, and poverty reduction, political campaigns just before the elections oftentimes reduce to mere communal propaganda (when a lot...