Jyoti Yadav is a multimedia journalist with ThePrint. She has been consistently pursuing on-ground reporting from rural and small-town India in journalism. During the first and second COVID-19 waves that caused havoc in India, she was on the road in UP and Bihar covering one of the biggest health crises that India has faced post Independence. Her COVID-19 reports have been followed up by national and international media houses. She fought her way out of rural Haryana’s stifling patriarchal set-up to reach the National Capital, becoming the first person to get a graduate and postgraduate degree in the family. During her college days at Delhi University, she learned to adapt to the ways of English writers to examine the condition of rural women. In journalism, she views the world through both her rural and urban lenses to bring an element of critical intersectionality to her reporting and writing. Along with her reportage of rural India, gender issues, policy and politics, she also writes a weekly blog called "Meri Jaan Mujhe Khabar hai" and hosts a weekly video show called "PageTurner" where she talks about recently launched non-fiction books. The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 brought to the surface the social and economic injustice, apathy, intolerance, and deep-seated systemic patriarchy. It has shaken us out of the complacency that three decades of impressive GDP growth, urban boom, and global clout had lulled us into. It reinforced the unsettling idea that our nation-building and modernity project is still fragile. She views her work and mission as a woman journalist as one making a critical intervention in this national journey. [Read More]
Alex Paul Menon, an Indian Administrative Service Officer of 2006, is a passionate civil servant who has worked, with utmost dedication and commitment, in the most remote, backward, and left-wing extremists-affected territories of the Central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. Alex pursues evidence-based policy design and constantly strives to bring research, data analysis, and external expertise into policy-making. He has implemented some large scale projects such as the free distribution of 3 million smartphones to women in order to bridge the digital gender divide and also astounding models of convergence in rural development, agriculture, and allied sectors. He sincerely believes technology is a great enabler in governance and has painstakingly worked on numerous e-governance solutions. A winner of the Prime Minister's award for Best Performance in Public Administration and a two-time winner of the National E-governance Awards, Alex is a believer in the combination of tech, data, and public policy being a potent mix and solution for many problems.
Migration across the world is either aspirational or distress led. In the Indian context, except for blue and white collar jobs, most of the migration is distress migration. In spite of humongous numbers migrating across the length and breadth of the country, acknowledging the huge numbers and the reasons behind the distress is not happening in India, requiring a systematic approach to tracking and assessing migration. Remedies can be prescribed after we know the numbers, the pattern, and the socioeconomic impact. It's important to draw our attention to counting migrants now so that public policy can be driven in the right direction. [Read More]
Benoy Peter is an expert on migration and social inclusion. He is the Co-founder of the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development, a non-profit devoted to the social inclusion of migrants in India. He has a Ph.D. in Population Sciences from the Department of Migration and Urban Studies, International Institute for Population Sciences, with over two decades' experience working with marginalized populations in India. Dr. Peter headed a consortium of organizations in preparation of the policy paper "Road Map for the Inclusion of Internal Migrant Workers in India’s Policy Framework for the ILO." He is a member of the Working Group on Labour in the Informal Sector, Kerala, constituted by the Kerala State Planning Board under the 14th Five Year Plan (2022-2027). He is also a member of the international advisory committee that guides the preparation of the action plan for the implementation of the National Strategy on Internal Displacement, Government of Bangladesh. [Read More]