A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) states that the Countrywide Lockdown imposed on 25th March, 2020, which was extended for nearly two months in phases, affected the food and nutritional status of vulnerable sections of the Indian population. It says that a programme like the Mid-Day Meal Scheme covers four-fifth of primary-school-aged children in the country that helps in improving not only nutrition but also...

-Newsclick.in The pandemic has heightened an already simmering economic crisis – and the worst is still to come. The number of employed persons in India plummeted from about 40 crore in January to 39 crore in April 2021. That’s a loss of one crore employed persons, one of the steepest falls ever in four months, barring the brutal devastation caused by last year’s complete Countrywide Lockdown in April-May 2020. This emerges from...

-Scroll.in A report by the collective Hunger Watch reveals the extent of continuing hunger caused by state policy, and recommends ways to end the distress. A spectacularly uncaring, unaccountable state has abandoned Indians to their fate. Bodies are piling up, pyres burn late into the night, and corpses are buried in anonymous mass graves. Loved ones are choking to death because their governments failed to secure them oxygen. Vaccines have fallen short...

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,...

-CaravanMagazine.in “The Thakurs in the village threatened me and said, ‘We will beat you so much you will go bald,’” a middle-aged Nishad resident of the Peshawa Mai Ghat village in the Jaunpur district of Uttar Pradesh, told us. The Nishads are a riverine community who were categorised as a Scheduled Caste in the state in 2019. On 30 May, the Nishad man’s minor daughter was found raped and murdered a...