-The Indian Express As far as the availability of food is concerned, the country has more than adequate stock. Also, thanks to a surplus monsoon, a bumper rabi crop is on its way. With markets shut, farm labourers absent from fields, and transportation services at a halt, is India likely to face a food crisis because of the coronavirus-induced lockdown? Possible, if steps are not taken in some key areas. As far as the...
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Locking down two different Indias -Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey
-The Hindu While some can practise social distancing, most Indians simply cannot as they have no social security What could possibly have been the reason for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to give only a four-hour notice for the lockdown? If the requirement was to keep the population indoors, strictly enforcing social distancing, how abjectly this has failed! Lakhs of migrant labourers have been jostling to get any form of transport back home;...
More »Mass migration defeats Corona preventive measures, MHA tells SC -Krishnadas Rajagopal
-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...
More »India’s seasonal migrants have been invisible for too long. This crisis should be a wake-up call -Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
-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...
More »Walking with the migrants, across four states, one story: What do we have here? -Dipankar Ghose
-The Indian Express As the national lockdown entered its second week, The Indian Express travelled across four states to track this unprecedented exodus, examine what social distancing and isolation means in towns and villages off camera and off the highway — and what could await the first COVID-19 patients here. Morena (Madhya Pradesh): They built homes, offices, even cities. They worked in technology companies. They cooked the food we ate, cleaned the...
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