-IndiaSpend.com To fight hunger and distress due to the pandemic, India must universalise foodgrain distribution, expand the food basket in its rations scheme and provide cash transfers, activist Anjali Bhardwaj tells us in this interview Bengaluru: The pandemic-induced lockdowns have had a profound impact on livelihoods, affecting poor Indians' food intake, studies show. In October 2020, more than half the respondents of a Hunger Survey said their rice/wheat consumption had declined during...

-Scroll.in It is technologically possible, but the real question is whether it is implementable. Since March 22, the day of the “janata curfew”, mainstream media in India has foregrounded the situation of urban workers like never before. Mainstream and social media has been flooded with videos and images of people walking as well as of urban workers who were stuck in hostile cities without food, even water and shelter at times. An exhausted...

In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...

-Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, January-June, 2021 This note examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on food security and indebtedness among rural households. It is based on a telephone survey of 164 households from 26 villages across 13 States. The survey was conducted by the Pandemic Studies Unit of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS), Bangalore, in October 2020. Of these 26 villages included in the 2020...

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,...