-ThePrint.in This is the moment to thank farmers. You don’t need thali or taali for that, you just need to ensure they get a fair price. Then we can kickstart India’s economy. As many states in north India begin their food grain procurement operations and more and more news begin to filter in from rural India, we can see one of the biggest blunders of the ongoing coronavirus lockdown strategy: it might...

-TheThirdPole.net Migrant workers in India, Pakistan and Nepal are crushed by poverty as earnings come to an abrupt halt in the lockdown forced by the Covid-19 pandemic Across South Asia, the impact of the Covid-19 on livelihoods has been extreme. Despite being an outlier in terms of low infection rates, and even low casualties, most South Asian countries have been left reeling due to the impact that shutdowns have had on migrant...

Most reports and studies by official agencies, international think tanks and private entities indicate the cataclysmic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy and society. They anticipate that lockdowns imposed by various countries across the globe to reduce the exponential diffusion of COVID-19 (i.e. for flattening the curve by social distancing and quarantines) would adversely affect economic growth and disrupt supply chains in most sectors, on top of causing...

-The Telegraph Provide emergency ration cards, universalise PDS in Rural areas and urban slums, says Dreze India’s foodgrain stocks have never been so bountiful, yet the government is struggling to ensure that no one remains hungry in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic that has sparked an unprecedented emergency involving jobless migrant workers, thousands of whom are stranded away from their homes. Stocks with Food Corporation of India was estimated to be around...

-India Spend Team The public distribution system (PDS) is meant to play a key role in disbursing government support to the poorest Indians during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. However, the system leaves more than 100 million people excluded from its reach, as per academics Jean Drèze, Reetika Khera and Meghana Mungikar, because the central government uses 2011 population figures from the last census to calculate state-wise PDS coverage. Under the National Food...