-Down to Earth Between 83 million and 132 million people could go hungry in 2020 due to COVID-19, according to the report Achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of ‘Zero Hunger’ that it had mandated by 2030, will be very difficult, a United Nations report released on July 13, 2020, has warned. Six hundred and ninety million people went hungry in 2019 — up by 10 million from 2018, and by nearly 60 million...
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Can raising the approved labour budget from 280.76 crore person-days to 306.6 crore person-days help the unskilled returnee migrants who prefer MGNREGA to Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan?
Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...
More »Completion of trials could take at least 6 to 9 months, says Soumya Swaminathan -R Prasad
-The Hindu It is encouraging to see that at least seven Indian companies are developing COVID-19 vaccines. All of them must be tested ... and till we see results from these trials, we cannot predict which of them will be successful, says the Chief Scientist at WHO A day after scientists and experts raised serious concerns over Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) letter to all 12 principal investigators to speed up...
More »At the forefront of India’s healthcare system, ASHA workers soldier on — unprotected and poorly paid -Anuradha Raman
-The Hindu Every government health scheme, including the one to fight COVID-19, needs ASHA workers to implement it at the grassroots level. So why can’t they at least be paid on time? If Anita Sharma*, an ASHA worker (or Accredited Social Health Activist), had a Twitter account, she could have tagged @drharshvardhan, the health minister, and introduced herself thus: My name is Anita. My job profile has changed since the coronavirus pandemic....
More »‘It’s unscientific’: Doctors entrusted with Covid-19 vaccine trial slam ICMR’s August 15 deadline -Arunabh Saikia
-Scroll.in The council chief wrote to 12 institutions asking them to enroll participants in the trials by July 7. Four days after India’s first indigenous vaccine candidate for Covid-19 was granted approval for human clinical trials by the drug regulator, the Indian Council of Medical Research on Thursday said that it wanted to “launch the vaccine for public health use latest by August 15”. On July 2, the council’s director-general Balram Bhargava wrote...
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