-Livemint.com After extreme rain and severe flooding, Pakistan is dealing with acute food shortage. Moreover, dollar crunch has kept Pakistani food importers at mercy of grey market Extreme floods MIGht not be a problem for Pakistanis anymore, but acute food shortage and drying forex reserve have made Pakistani food importers vulnerable to the grey market for payments. Under the grey market, the commodities are traded through markets that are unauthorised by the manufacturers....

-The Telegraph At present, India has 195 million households with ration cards (nearly 794 million people), lower than the beneficiaries we intended to target in 2013 Inordinate delays in carrying out the census exercise are depriving millions of Indians who rely on rations for their subsistence. The exclusion of the poorest from the public distribution system in the pre and post-pandemic years was first flagged by the economists, Jean Drèze and Reetika...

-The Hindu Near-universal social security pensions would be a good start to a radical expansion of public support for the elderly Life expectancy in India has more than doubled since Independence — from around 32 years in the late 1940s to 70 years or so today. Many countries have done even better, but this is still a historical achievement. Over the same period, the fertility rate has crashed from about six children...

-Press release by International Labour Organisation dated 12 September, 2022 Latest estimates show that forced labour and forced marriage have increased significantly in the last five years, according to the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for MIGration. GENEVA (ILO News): Fifty million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, according to the latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. Of these people, 28 million were in forced labour...

-Newsclick.in Researchers will now focus on how the Dwarf Virus, first found in China, entered Punjab and Haryana. Even though the virus causing the ‘dwarfing’ of paddy in Punjab and Haryana is new in the country, the insect that carries the virus has been here for years, according to a latest research by scientists at Ludhiana’s Punjab Agriculture University (PAU), the Indian Express reported. The Southern Rice Black-streaked Dwarf Virus (SRBSDV) is carried...