-Financial Express Check nutritional vulnerability amongst poor children during the Lockdown. In India, inequitable distribution of resources is a major challenge that has impeded access to nutrition for a sizeable population and harmed the children the most. According to the National Family Health Survey, 2015-16, every second child, aged 0-5 years, from the poorest 20% households in India suffers from some form of undernutrition, i.e. stunting or underweight or wasting. However, the...

-The Hindu The SOFI report and Lockdown distress have renewed focus on what is also the world’s largest food insecure population Data from the latest edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report show that India retains the dubious distinction of being the country with the largest population of food insecure people. Estimates presented in the report which was released by several United Nations organisations show...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...

-Hindustan Times Dungarpur: India’s rural employment guarantee scheme is falling short in helping residents tide over the economic distress caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent Lockdown restrictions, data from Rajasthan suggest. Nearly 43% households who took up work under the scheme in Dungarpur, a largely tribal district in southern Rajasthan, had completed more than 50 of their 100 days of work in the first four months of the current financial...

-The Indian Express The plight of salaried employees has worsened since the Lockdown, with a loss of 17.7 million salaried jobs in April, additional 0.1 million jobs in May, followed by gain of 3.9 million jobs in June and then again loss of 5 million jobs in July, it said. New Delhi: Salaried jobs suffered the biggest hit during the Lockdown, with total loss estimated to be at 18.9 million during April-July,...