During the last one year, India seems to have lost the race in becoming the world leader in terms of development, prosperity and growth thanks to the recession brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. The total number of poor people in the country has swelled and the middle class has shrunk in 2020 in comparison to what was anticipated earlier. A new study by the United States based think tank Pew...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

-The Hindu A study at the Ludhiana-based Punjab Agricultural University to track the impact of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPO) on the income and employment of farmers in Punjab during 2019-20, has revealed that incomes increased after farmers joined the FPOs and the impact was greater among small, marginal and semi-medium farmers. Chandigarh: The study, titled “Economic Impact of Farmer Producer Organisations on Punjab Peasantry”, asserts that overall, the while permanent labour employment...

School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

Large dams that cause environmental degradation and large-scale displacement, among other things, have been opposed in India by civil society organisations (CSOs), such as Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), National Alliance of People's Movement (NAPM) and People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). A recently published study by the United Nations University's Canada-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health along with other partner organisations reveals that tens of thousands of existing large...