-TwoCircles.net Centre for Equity Studies has released a report on the migrant crisis documenting how India’s most vulnerable class has suffered due to the unplanned national lockdown by the Central government for COVID-19. The report titled ‘Labouring Lives: Hunger, Precarity and Despair amid Lockdown’ addressed vital questions of how the country’s labouring class – stranded and jobless – coped with the lockdown living away from their homes. The research has been conducted...

-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...

-Down to Earth National Green Tribunal’s 2019 order asking states to identify, protect and restore water bodies underlines the urgency to save them The nationwide lockdown imposed to break the spread of the novel coronavirus disease spread in India brought into light a new, pleasant discovery — improvement in quality of several water bodies and their catchments as a host of industrial activities halted. There is a need to restore and create more...

-Society for Social and Economic Research Monograph 20/3 Key Messages Lack of planning and preparation by the Central government for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a massive blow to India’s economy and has caused enormous hardships to working people of the country. Harvesting of Rabi crops • Unplanned and sudden imposition of the lockdown resulted in a massive and unprecedented disruption to agricultural activities such as harvesting, sale of agricultural produce, and purchase...

-TheWire.in There remains a wide chasm between the financial resources committed in budgets and the actual expenditure aimed at providing social security benefits for workers. The unprecedented crisis that the unplanned lockdown pushed workers into has once again forced social activists and researchers to contemplate over whether a legislation passed in 2008 by parliament could have provided relief to workers. Careful scrutiny of the financial resources as committed in budgets and the actual...