-Scroll.in The focus is on providing food grains to the very poor as against supporting that with more funding for existing nutrition-focussed welfare programmes. Data collated from a recent paper -studying the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 by Jean Dreze and Anmol Somanchi reflect the grim condition of India’s looming malnutrition crisis. In a co-authored essay around April 2020, we had argued how the “hidden costs of this pandemic” (and the...

-TheWire.in Treating occupational safety for sanitation workers as a technical issue about personal protective equipment is not enough to understand the various elements involved, from changing behaviour to the larger context of sanitation workers’ lives. At 8 am every morning, Murali, a de-sludging operator bids his two children goodbye and leaves his house. He cleans his vehicle, removes and tucks his chappals in a corner of his truck, and begins his workday. As...

-Down to Earth Around 88% respondents want to switch to less-polluting alternatives but report they are not easily available Around 12.3 billion sanitary napkins, amounting to 113,000 tonnes of waste, reached India’s landfills every year, according to a new study. Improper disposal and non-segregation from household waste leads to unhygienic working condition for waste workers, the report said. Commonly available sanitary napkins constitute 90 per cent plastic, the report claimed. India generates 3.3...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-The Hindu Labourers from West Bengal, Assam have gone home to exercise their franchise Kochi: Kabir Ahmad (name changed), a migrant worker in Perumbavoor, had to spend a small fortune on a flight ticket to return home to Hojai district of Assam last month following his parents’ anguished plea to get back in time for voting. Their desperation was borne out of the perceived danger posed to the community by the National...