-The Indian Express The cash crunch is hindering the state governments’ relief efforts at every step. Centre must urgently provide additional foodgrain to poorest states for expanding PDS coverage. As the monsoon advances, there is an urgent need to consider what can be done to prevent hunger during the rainy season — the hardest time of the year for poor families in large parts of rural India. The monsoon is expected to...
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Locust invasions in a number of Indian states have arisen out of climate change induced extreme rainfalls in desert areas
In the midst of COVID-19 lockdown, desert locust swarms have been seen in parts of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh in the second half of May 2020. The recent attacks by desert locust swarms have caused massive crop damage, depletion in the stock of cattle fodder and destruction of green vegetation in these states. As on 25th May, 2020, over half of Rajasthan’s 33 districts were...
More »Impact of Covid-19 on Indian Villages -Tapas Singh Modak, Sandipan Baksi, and Deepak Johnson
-Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, January-June, 2020 This note analyses the impact of the lockdown – which brought almost all economic and public activity in India to a halt – on a select group of villages based on a rapid assessment survey conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) in April 2020. The survey was conducted through telephone interviews of 52 informants from 21 villages across 10...
More »The need for a million worksites now -Jean Drèze
-The Hindu Averting a humanitarian disaster in India calls for an explosion of NREGA work in the next few weeks The abominable plight of migrant workers in recent weeks has invaded television screens and stirred the nation’s conscience. Alas, this is just the tip of the wave of hardships that is sweeping through the country. The situation looks increasingly alarming in the light of a series of surveys conducted by Azim Premji...
More »Modi Govt is Blind to the Crushing Jobs Crisis -Subodh Varma
-Newsclick.in Additional funds for MSMEs and MGNREGA are going to create enough jobs, but the economy will remain in doldrums. There has been much mutual patting on the back and self-congratulation, after the Narendra Modi government announced two policy measures that could have a direct impact on job creation. These were: a special credit line of Rs.3 lakh crore for MSMEs (medium, small and micro enterprises) and an additional allocation of Rs.40,000...
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