-The Indian Express Jean Dreze writes: Releasing food is all the more crucial as the emergency cash transfers proposed by the finance minister are likely to have severe limitations. How would you feel if a family were to let its weakest members starve, even as the house’s granary is full to the brim? That is what is happening in India today. Everyone knows that the country has large food stocks, and that some...
More »SEARCH RESULT
What we should do about COVID-19 -P Sainath
-RuralIndiaOnline.org The government’s ‘package’ responding to the crisis is a blend of callousness and cluelessness With his first speech on the coronavirus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi got us to scare evil spirits away by having people bang the hell out of their pots and pans. With his second, he scared the hell out of all of us. With not a word on how the public, particularly the poor, are to access food and other...
More »How a ration shop in Dantewada is restoring normalcy by providing grains -Gargi Verma
-The Indian Express Thanks to the efforts of district police and administration, villagers are recovering from Naxal violence. Raipur: Twenty-eight-year old Devi Podiam, a resident of Potali village in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, is used to allocating two full days at the beginning of each month just to walk over 10 km to a ration shop in Tirkapara in order to get monthly supplies of rice and other necessities for her family....
More »Seeds of Hope -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express India’s premier farm research and education institute has a full-time director after nearly four years. It is an institution whose blockbuster varieties account for more than 95% of the country’s Rs 32,800-crore annual basmati rice export revenues, nearly half of its total wheat area, and a quarter of that sown under mustard. Yet, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI, better known as Pusa Institute) has an annual research budget...
More »Eight years in bonded labour, tribals recall horror, now hope for new life, homes -Kavitha Iyer
-The Indian Express For eight years, Kantabai Jadhav was among 14 tribal men and women, and eight children, who lived as bonded labourers working on farms, a cowshed and a rice mill just 120 km from Mumbai in Dhamane village of Pune’s Maval taluka. Ahmednagar, Pune: “They would call us dogs, and other bad words for women… There was no cooking oil, nor any vegetables, ever. There was dried fish and foodgrain...
More »