-Down to Earth Pandemic-induced poverty and rise in food prices keep healthy diet out of reach of three billion people Good food or just food? “Our choice is always the latter. We need to survive.” Sukru Ojha, the 56-year-old resident of Koraput, Odisha told Down To Earth in April in reply to a query on whether the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic-induced income loss impacted his food intake. Koraput is one of...

-The Hindu  Growth impulses remained fragile, manufacturing output tanked 9.5% After touching a six-month high in May, India’s retail inflation was virtually unchanged in June at about 6.3%, remaining out of the central bank’s comfort zone for a second month in a row. Economists expect the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to revisit its inflation estimate of 5.1% for 2021-22 and stressed that lack of fiscal policy action to cool prices could precipitate...

-Newsclick.in Government must explore non-conventional resources to achieve energy security. Its current policy to blend ethanol and biodiesel helps the biofuel industry at the cost of food security. In a recent press conference, the Union Food Secretary Sudhanshu Pandey said that in 2020-21 the Centre allocated about 78,000 tonnes of rice from the Food Corporation of India (FCI) stocks to distilleries to produce ethanol. The distilleries got rice at a subsidised Rs.20...

-Press release by National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) dated 2nd July, 2021  The sudden and unplanned lockdown imposed by the union government in March 2020 in the wake of pandemic had caused immense hardship to the informal sector workers. After much criticism and concern on its inaction, Supreme Court on 26.05.2020 took suo moto cognizance of “problems and miseries of the migrant labourers”. Later, several persons associated with people’s organisations...

-The Hindu Business Line The development economist, now part of Tamil Nadu’s Economic Advisory Council, says that public expenditure on health is just 0.6 per cent of the state domestic product, one of the lowest ratios among Indian states * Universal quality education, health care and social security are still distant goals * A well-designed system of emergency cash transfers would be quite useful in this situation of recurrent crises, which may last...