-Down to Earth The government will use its extensive network of women’s self-help groups to encourage the transition. The Andhra Pradesh government announced financial support to more than 70,000 women from scheduled castes (SC) to promote natural farming among marginal farmers. Natural farming excludes the application of chemicals and promotes traditional agricultural practices. It is regarded as particularly useful for smallholder farmers as it reduces dependency on purchased inputs.   A one-time subsidy of...

-The Hindu It is high time that the process of monitoring nutrition got importance over survey outcomes The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 shows negligible gains in nutritional outcomes among under-five children. There has been tardy progress in reducing undernutrition, wasting and stunting. It is a national shame that even now, 35.5% of under-five children are stunted and 19.3% are wasted. Childhood anaemia has worsened from NFHS-4. Anaemia among adolescent girls and...

-DeccanHerald.com  Thanks to a farmers' initiative, Karnataka now has around 80 desi varieties of finger millet to choose from A group of farmers and members of women’s self-help groups have gathered at Eshwar Gouda Patil’s field to celebrate ‘Ragi Field Day’. This farm in Mattighatta village, in Dharwad’s Kundagol taluk, has as many as 72 varieties of ragi (finger millet), cultivated on half an acre of land, leaves visitors awestruck. Kumara Naidu, a farmer...

The increase in the total number of suicides committed in India during 2020 in comparison to the previous years has hit the headlines recently. While some media commentators have stated that the economic distress (caused by job loss, income loss, failure of business, and growing hunger, among other things) in 2020 could have led to more suicides being committed, others have said that home isolation and deteriorating mental health (associated...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...