-Scroll.in The head of Azim Premji’s Centre for Sustainable Employment on the tremendous distress hiding beneath job market statistics in India. If you looked at just the bare employment figures for India over 2020, you might think that most people recovered from the shock of the national lockdown and the economic crisis that followed. Yet though there was indeed a recovery before the brutal second wave hit, the headline numbers paper over...
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Rural health care needs fixing, and now -Bhupinder Singh Hooda
-The Hindu A takeaway from the pandemic is that India needs to revisit and refurbish its health infrastructure in the rural areas The two consecutive waves of COVID-19 and Mucormycosis have left us shattered. Multiple bruises have been caused to us. But during the second wave of the pandemic, it is our rural people who are struggling the most. They are struggling to get prompt and quality health care. The key role...
More »Govt. has an active role to play during the pandemic in terms of nutritional support, education & jobs, says IFPRI report
A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) states that the countrywide lockdown imposed on 25th March, 2020, which was extended for nearly two months in phases, affected the food and nutritional status of vulnerable sections of the Indian population. It says that a programme like the Mid-Day Meal Scheme covers four-fifth of primary-school-aged children in the country that helps in improving not only nutrition but also...
More »Covid-19 and the disease of inequality -Yamini Aiyar
-Hindustan Times The second wave will deepen inequality. Expand support to states, universalise PDS, and ramp up MGNREGS now Abandoned by the State that insisted on locking down, refusing to recognise the damage done to their livelihoods, India’s workers asserted their rights and made themselves heard by walking home in March 2020. The long march home was emblematic of the suffering and hardship unleashed by the first wave. A year later, it is...
More »A bullet train to hunger -Dipa Sinha and Rajendran Narayanan
-The Hindu The pandemic has highlighted the importance of expanding social security nets Pinki is a 28-year-old Dalit woman from Saharanpur, U.P. Her husband met with an accident during the national lockdown in April 2020. The two of them had to sell all their belongings for his treatment and subsequently became dependent on her parents. Such avoidable miseries were heaped on millions due to the unilateral national lockdown in 2020. The monthly...
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