-The Telegraph V. Muraleedharan stresses the need for all countries to appreciate the importance of 'equity, affordability and accessibility' when it comes to foodgrains Under pressure to reconsider the wheat export ban, India on Wednesday sought to turn the tables on the West by urging it to not hoard the foodgrain the way Covid vaccines were cornered by the developed world and maintained that there were food security exceptions to the restrictions...

A recently released study, which has been done by Dalberg in collaboration with Kantar, and with support from the Omidyar Network India, brings to light both the supply and demand-side perspectives on the 'One Nation One Ration Card' (ONORC) scheme. Titled 'Fulfilling the promise of One Nation One Ration Card: A frontline perspective from 5 Indian states', the survey for the study was conducted in five states i.e., Andhra Pradesh,...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-Livemint.com From the large volume of portability transactions under ONORC, it is evident that the beneficiaries are leveraging the facility of ration portability to access their NFSA as well as PMGKAY foodgrains from any FPS of their choice, without being dependent on the tagged ration shop in the ration card, Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey said About 56 crore ration card portability transactions have taken place till January 31, since the launch...

Remote teaching and learning promoted by Edtech companies as an alternative to physical classrooms, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, may have a sizeable consumer base in our country. However, at the bottom of the pyramid, there are only a few takers of online education. In reality, class and caste-divide, which is more prominent in rural areas, affects access to digital learning. The majority of the school going...