-The Hindu In the pandemic, there aren’t enough buyers and government procurement is delayed For the second year running, forest dwellers across Odisha have been deprived of the right price for the Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) gathered by them. With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting local economies across the country, the NTFP market in Odisha has also suffered due to the absence of adequate buyers this year. “Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced, forest...

-NetworkIdeas.org Following its $1.9 trillion Covid-relief package, the Biden administration has further announced an infrastructure package of $2.3 trillion. But in contrast to the former which is to be spent within months, the latter is to be spent over an eight-year period. And this package in turn is to be followed by a “human infrastructure” package. All this adds up to a massive stimulus for the economy as well as a...

-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,...

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,...

-Livemint.com A section of the BJP’s own supporters, and its vocal middle class base appears opposed to the controversial farm laws In 2015, the first Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central government unveiled an ambitious reform to overhaul India’s land acquisition laws that would have enabled corporations easier access to land across the country. But faced with intense protests from Opposition parties, the changes were rolled back. In 2020, the second Modi-led...