-IndiaSpend.com To fight hunger and distress due to the pandemic, India must universalise foodgrain distribution, expand the food basket in its rations scheme and provide cash transfers, activist Anjali Bhardwaj tells us in this interview Bengaluru: The pandemic-induced lockdowns have had a profound impact on livelihoods, affecting poor Indians' food intake, studies show. In October 2020, more than half the respondents of a Hunger Survey said their rice/wheat consumption had declined during...
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Modi Govt’s Policy to Reduce Oil Imports: Subsidise the Rich, Burden the Poor! -Ayaskant Das
-Newsclick.in Rice meant for the poor will be sold at subsidised rates to privately-owned ethanol distilleries. The industries will be given cheap loans and exempted from Environmental Clearances. Is the Modi government subsidising the rich at the cost of the poor by diverting foodgrains meant for the most impoverished sections of the population to private industries for producing alcohol for India’s ethanol blended petrol programme? There’s more: For manufacturing ethanol, foodgrains will not...
More »Modi government’s ‘One Nation, One Ration’ is an attempt to deflect attention from actual solutions -Reetika Khera
-Scroll.in It is technologically possible, but the real question is whether it is implementable. Since March 22, the day of the “janata curfew”, mainstream media in India has foregrounded the situation of urban workers like never before. Mainstream and social media has been flooded with videos and images of people walking as well as of urban workers who were stuck in hostile cities without food, even water and shelter at times. An exhausted...
More »Doorstep delivery of rations sounds like a good idea -- but it actually raises many hard questions -Reetika Khera
-Scroll.in The debate over the proposal has turned into a political slugfest. Crucial questions remain unaddressed. In 2016, the Delhi government ran a pilot in 42 out of its roughly 2,500 Public distribution System outlets. At these outlets, Aadhaar-based biometric authentication was introduced at the time of sale of grain to ration card holders. A survey was done by students of Lady Shri Ram College at one of the pilot PDS outlets, incidentally...
More »It’s time to protect the poor and the migrants from rising edible oil prices
In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...
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