-Scroll.in The Working People’s Charter told the Centre that the economic risks the COVID-19 poses to workers employed in the informal sector cannot be overlooked. The Working People’s Charter, a labour rights group, on Friday urged the Centre to create an emergency fund of Rs 50,000 crore to provide social and economic support to workers in the informal sectors amid the escalating coronavirus pandemic. The organisation, which claims to represent trade unions...
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India’s Covid-19 worry: too few are being tested -Penny MacRae
-The Telegraph Under-estimation of cases, inadequate number of ICU beds, old test kits add to challenge India could soon face its moment of reckoning with the Covid-19 pandemic and the question is whether the country, with its rickety, under-resourced healthcare system, will be able to cope. The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in India hit 151 Wednesday and, so far, there have been three deaths. On the surface, those numbers look extraordinarily...
More »Chickening out: Coronavirus pushes Indian poultry industry to its worst crisis -Parthasarathi Biswas
-The Indian Express The Indian poultry industry is going through its worst crisis, this time from unsubstantiated fears linking the spread of COVID-19 to chicken consumption. Urja Foods and Agro’s hatchery unit spread over 10 acres in Gawadewadi village of Pune district’s Ambegaon taluka wears a deserted look. Not surprising at all, when its production of day-old chicks was 5.4 lakh in February but is unlikely to cross 2 lakh this month....
More »Organic farming: The food forest of Nayagarh -Satyasundar Barik
-The Hindu Among this year’s Padma Shri awardees are a father and daughter who turned a barren wasteland into a riot of trees and crops Furrowed with deep gullies, its topsoil all but gone, this degraded patch of land near Odagaon in Odisha’s Nayagarh district was once a dense forest. Whenever nature tried to reclaim it, the little shoots would be nibbled away by goats and sheep. The villagers who owned the...
More »MGNREGA allocation is way off the mark to uplift the rural economy & address economic downturn, say Right to Work activists
The Union Budget 2020-21, which was presented by the Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman on 1st February, 2020 has failed to impress civil society activists and farmers' rights groups (click here and here). Through their press releases and notes, members of CSOs were demanding as well as suggesting the Union Government for hiking the budgetary allocation for schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and Pradhan Mantri...
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