-The Indian Express Mani Shankar Aiyar writes: Planning for withstanding the ingress of COVID-19 requires the full deployment of the mechanisms for district planning envisaged in Article 243 ZD involving all three tiers of the panchayats and the municipalities brought together in the district planning committee An unintended but welcome consequence of the struggle against COVID-19 is that the “confrontational federalism” that has characterised the Centre’s relations with the states, especially those...
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Legislation a must to ensure workers aren’t denied salaries during pandemic -Kabeer Shrivastava
-The Telegraph Morality forbids what the law doesn’t: For now, employers should follow this adage and pay due wages It’s one of the Covid-19 lockdown’s most tragic side-effects: employers forced to suspend business operations, leaving them without the cashflow to pay their employees. And often, the workers not getting paid are those earning minimum wages that have no cash reserves to fall back on. These people who are getting hit the hardest...
More »Not at the cost of food security -Siraj Hussain & Ajit Ranade
-The Indian Express Diverting rice to produce ethanol during the pandemic is unethical. Surplus grains should be used to feed those in distress. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and a country-wide lockdown came an announcement that was difficult to believe. The press release said the National Biofuel Coordination Committee (NBCC) chaired by the Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas has decided to use “surplus” rice available with the Food...
More »COVID-19: Can we flatten the un-sustainability curve? -Venkatesh Dutta
-Down to Earth The Earth needs to resurrect and heal. It is the right time to define collective growth and prosperity, not in terms of rising income but rising ecological wellbeing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and Ebola have shaken the global economy and society in the last two decades. The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) disease is following suit. The nature has hit a reset button. Economies are in a...
More »Indian education can’t go online – only 8% of homes with young members have computer with net link -Protiva Kundu
-Scroll.in The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed how rooted structural imbalances are between rural and urban, male and female, rich and poor, even in the digital world. As an immediate measure to stem the spread of Covid-19, most educational institutions have been shut since the end of March. It is still difficult to predict when schools, colleges and universities will reopen. There are few options other than to shift to digital platforms from...
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