-The Hindu A simple reading of U.P.’s draft population control law is that it will grossly impinge on the right to reproductive freedom On Sunday, the government of Uttar Pradesh released a “Population Policy” in which it stated its intention to bring the gross fertility rate in the State down from the existing 2.7 to 2.1 by 2026. To achieve this, the government says it will consider the enactment of a new...

-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 recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

-The Hindu Underestimation is likely as the CRS is still an imperfect system, with potential sources of error Over the last month, Indian journalists from across the country have accessed and reported on State-level all-cause mortality from the Civil Registration System (CRS), currently confidential and closed to the public. While India’s official death toll from COVID-19 has been suspect from the very beginning — for reasons that are partly institutional and partly...

-Down to Earth The water requirement for the Bunder mine and ore processing plant is about 5.9 million cubic meters in a year The proposed diamond mine in the Buxwaha protected forest region in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh may have a greater ecological impact on the region than projected so far.  The project threatens to further deplete the already scarce water reserve of the drought-prone Bundelkhand region to excavate about five million...