-The Hindu Uday Kotak highlights risks of not spending, says a lot will hinge on States’ approach to reopening. India’s economy urgently needs increased fiscal spending from the government to support businesses that have suffered Stress from the COVID-19-related disruptions, as well as households and individuals worst hit by the pandemic, CII president Uday Kotak said on Wednesday. “I think the time has come for the fisc [fiscal authorities] to do a lot...

-TheCitizen.in ‘The whole process is faceless’ As the managing director of CropData Sachin Suri explained to Microsoft’s news desk last year, the abstract looking artwork behind him is not a painting. “This is actually a spectral analysis satellite image of farms. Each tiny spot, or a geo-spatial tile, is an actual field in Punjab and the different colors denote the Stress levels in individual farms.” That frame is the crux of what CropData,...

-TheNewsMinute.com The Union government has been blamed for sitting on a pile of essential medical tools such as ventilators and oxygen concentrators while daily thousands of COVID-19 patients hustled for oxygen cylinders and hundreds died gasping for breath. Days after the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) stated that COVID-19 relief aid was being distributed effectively in response to concerns raised by media reports, The Reporters’ Collective has found that...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-Newsclick.in About 200 families residing in the informal housing settlements in Delhi were directly or indirectly affected by the demolition drive carried out by the authorities in the month of April. Slum dwellers in the national capital find their woes compounded by the looming threat of forced evictions by the government authorities – that continued apace last year and has not spared families despite the resurgence in COVID-19 cases now. About 200 families...