-PTI/ The Hindu Currently, basic customs duty on crude palm oil is 15%, while it is 45% for all other categories of palmolein. The government on Tuesday reduced basic customs duty on crude palm oil to 10%, which will help bring down the edible oil prices in the retail market. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) in a notification cut the basic customs duty on crude palm oil to 10%...

-Firstpost.com For many deafblind people, their paths and lived experiences are steeped in inaccessibility and hurdles — worsening in the times of COVID-19. What is normal, anyway? In this monthly column, Srinidhi Raghavan explores the understanding of bodies-minds and navigating spaces as disabled, chronically ill and sick people. Read more from the series here. For many of us in society, we often see disabled people as either ‘helpless’ or ‘inspirational’. For the longest...

-TheWire.in Sainath dedicated the prize to his fellow journalists who are reporting from rural India and to PARI, the news website he founded in 2014. New Delhi: Renowned journalist P. Sainath was the recipients of the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, one of Japan’s top awards open to people from all Asian countries for “investigate[ing] impoverished farming villages in India, listen[ing] to voices from the rural population”. The Fukuoka Prize has three categories, Academic...

-The Hindu “It should result in universalisation of rations to all migrant workers during the pandemic” The Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday should result in the universalisation of rations to all migrant workers across India as long as the pandemic continues, as opposed to the government’s one-time relief measures, said intervenors in the petition. Social activists Harsh Mander, Anjali Bhardwaj and Jagdeep Chhokar also welcomed the Supreme Court’s direction to the government to...

-CBGAIndia.in India’s response to the pandemic has depended heavily on the exploited labour of women workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds. These are ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists, the cadre of frontline health workers that has been mobilised for everything from door-to-door surveys, distributing medicine kits, measuring oxygen saturation, monitoring containment zones and spreading awareness about vaccines. 70,000 such women recently went on strike in Maharashtra demanding higher pay,...