-The Hindu The debate on agricultural issues must take into account the changed geography of procurement and the seller’s profile According to one definition, a factoid is “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”. After the passage of the three controversial farm laws, the Minimum Support Price (MSP) — not mentioned in the laws — has gained a lot of attention....

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-Frontline.in Interview with Nikhil Dey, rights activist and founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, on 15 years of the Right to Information Act. India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act, which was promulgated in 2005, is considered one of the most advanced and powerful pieces of rights legislation in the world. Although an evolved law that forces governments to become more transparent and accountable, almost every regime has shown reluctance to uphold...

-NDTV.com blog The devastation and suffering due to the Covid pandemic is unparalleled and continues to unfold in its multiple dimensions. Amidst this colossal misery in India, the most excruciatingly vivid and heart-wrenching has been the migrant crisis triggered as a consequence of a sudden lockdown. As a nation, we witnessed the unfolding of the harrowing tragedy of migrant workers, where millions of them, particularly in our metro cities, were rendered...

-The Hindu Reducing the burden of child undernutrition needs a policy goal — providing affordable access to quality food items The provisional verdict from the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS 2019-20 factsheets on the burden of child undernutrition is not encouraging, with few exceptions. For the most part, this assessment has relied on the measure of a child’s anthropometry, i.e., children are defined as stunted, underweight or wasted...