-TheWire.in While there may be no fears of a shortage, the national lockdown and its implementation have dealt a raw deal to most stakeholders within the system. New Delhi: Ghazipur’s vegetable and flower mandi wears a forlorn look these days. Just a few kilometres from the Anand Vihar Bus Terminal, which was thronged by thousands of migrant workers last weekend, the flower mandi’s business is muted, mirroring to a certain extent the stark...

-The Indian Express Epidemics are social dramas whose plots are made from the bricks and mortar of local material. An understanding of this will tell us who lives, who dies and what kind of society emerges. The odd thing about an epidemic is that though it might be global in nature, it is impossible to understand its impact without paying close attention to the local conditions within which it circulates. Calls for...

-The Indian Express With small land-holdings, hilly terrains, water scarcity and parched lands, farming is neither profitable nor a dependable source of income in many villages. Dahod: The ardous journey is not just what migrant labourers, who are returning in thousands from cities to their villages amid an unprecedented nation wide lockdown in view of the coronavirus pandemic, are facing. Deeper economic uncertainties stare at many of them back in their villages. Sukhlal...

-The Hindu Blames ‘fake’ online messages for the panic The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the 21-day national lockdown was “inevitable” in the face of an “unprecedented global crisis” like COVID-19. The government blamed “fake and misleading” messages on social media about COVID-19 for creating widespread panic, which led to mass “barefoot” journey of migrant workers from cities to their native villages. Please click here to...

-Scroll.in This is an important reminder that policies with a 120 million-person hole at the heart of them are flawed. India’s chaotic attempt to go into a lockdown to combat the coronavirus has had an unusual side-effect: it has the attention of the elites, ensconced in their homes during the three-week period, to the plight of the country’s massive migrant labour population. The Central government’s failure to adequately plan forced hundreds of thousands...