THE 2021 Global Hunger Report released recently has once again highlighted the deplorable conditions of food insecurity and nutrition in India. The paradox is that India is simultaneously the country with the largest number of hungry people in the world and the country with the largest public stocks of foodgrains.

DURING the pandemic when the plight and sufferings of migrant workers had turned into the greatest human disaster, the Modi regime has, without any remorse, repealed the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 (ISMW Act, 1979) by “amalgamating” it with the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSHWC Code).

THE Goods and Services Taxation regime is antithetical to the very idea of cooperative federalism. The rightwing is conducting an all-out campaign to impose one tax across the country ignoring the need for diversity and local autonomy.

The report submitted by the Fifteenth Finance Commission points out that in the year 2018-19, 62.7 per cent of the total tax revenue is collected by the union government. But when it comes to expenditure, 62.4 per cent of the total government expenditure is borne by the states.

THE corporate media also had to note the beating that PM Modi’s and BJP’s image got due to failure in management/mismanagement of Covid-19 pandemic; bringing in stark reality the absence of public healthcare infrastructure both in urban and rural India; lack of equipment, oxygen and medicines and healthcare personnel; and lakhs of counted and uncounted deaths as aptly penned by ParulKhakkar in Shab-Bahini Ganga and the king becoming ‘Nang

THE central government in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court on September 23, stated that it is not possible to carry out caste census in the 2021 census operation. It also made it clear that this was a ‘conscious policy decision’. The reasons advanced by the central government for its rejection of the widely supported demand for conducting caste census as a part of the general census are flimsy and trivial.