-The Hindu Move after meeting with manufacturers A Day after fertilizer producers announced a sharp 46% to 58.33% hike in prices citing higher raw material costs, the Central government intervened on FriDay to ensure a rollback even though fertilizer prices are no longer regulated. Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilizers Mansukh Mandaviya said prices would remain unchanged for now, after a ‘high-level’ meeting was held with the major fertilizer companies. Opposition parties had...

-Countercurrents.org More than half of rural households in India are landless, or almost so. This deprives them of the most obvious asset needed for sustainable livelihoods and food security in villages–farmland. After  agriculture the next most important source of rural livelihood in India is dairy farming but here too the household with farmland has free access to crop residues which is increasingly not available to landless households who  have to incur extra...

-The Indian Express Maharashtra is staring at a shortage of both beds and vaccines. With the state estimated to record around 60,000 new cases daily for next few Days, a bed shortage may just be 7-10 Days away. Ahead of the Prime Minister’s meeting with Chief Ministers on managing the Covid-19 surge, a look at some states, their issues with beds and vaccines, and their demands of the Centre. Odisha Odisha only has three...

-The Indian Express While there is no such official nationwide data, experts note that the migration back to workplaces since the end of the first lockdown has been increasingly single, male migration, leaving families behind. Ranchi: In February this year, Md Shabbir Ansari travelled with his family back home to Giridih, Jharkhand, and after dropping them, returned to Delhi to look for work. Fired from his job repairing cars in Ghaziabad, Ansari...

-The Hindu In the post-pandemic world, addressing inequality is key to sustaining growth and well-being COVID-19 in the last one year has once again reminded us of the growing inequalities in India. A recent Pew Research Report shows that India’s middle class may have shrunk by a third due to the novel coronavirus pandemic while the number of poor people earning less than ₹150 per Day more than doubled. The Pew report...