-Press release by International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems dated 30th March, 2021 * New report sounds alarm on control of food tech, farming data, and corporate takeover of UN multilateral agencies. * Civil society and social movements can fight back, boosting post-pandemic resilience, slashing agriculture’s GHG emissions by 75%, and shifting $4 trillion to sustainable food and farming. The future planned by agribusiness giants could accelerate environmental breakdown and jeopardize...
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A Reality Check on India’s Search for Digital Utopia -Preeti Mudliar
-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the persistent digital divide afflicting rural India owing to poor and insufficient internet connectivity. With the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech acknowledging the need ‘to complete’ internet connectivity to villages, there is a renewed vigour and interest in the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN)/BharatNet project. An important question to pose when translating policy to project is: when should...
More »Getting cash transfers out of a JAM -Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera
-The Hindu For effective cash relief in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the government must think beyond the Jan Dhan Yojana For some years now, the so-called JAM trinity (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) has been propounded as a dream cash-transfer infrastructure for India. The term “trinity” itself gives a sense of the faith and fervour this project sought to inspire (why not “trio”?). It was born in chapter 3 of the Economic Survey 2015,...
More »Indian education can’t go online – only 8% of homes with young members have computer with net link -Protiva Kundu
-Scroll.in The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed how rooted structural imbalances are between rural and urban, male and female, rich and poor, even in the digital world. As an immediate measure to stem the spread of Covid-19, most educational institutions have been shut since the end of March. It is still difficult to predict when schools, colleges and universities will reopen. There are few options other than to shift to digital platforms from...
More »Inequality of another kind -Sumeysh Srivastava
-The Hindu Why the right to Internet access and digital literacy should be recognised as a right in itself Recently, in Faheema Shirin v. State of Kerala, the Kerala High Court declared the right to Internet access as a fundamental right forming a part of the right to privacy and the right to education under Article 21 of the Constitution. While this is a welcome move, it is important to recognise the...
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