-Down to Earth Pandemic-induced poverty and rise in food prices keep healthy diet out of reach of three billion people Good food or just food? “Our choice is always the latter. We need to survive.” Sukru Ojha, the 56-year-old resident of Koraput, Odisha told Down To Earth in April in reply to a query on whether the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic-induced income loss impacted his food intake. Koraput is one of...
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Making Ethanol from Rice Hurts India’s Poor -Soma Marla
-Newsclick.in Government must explore non-conventional resources to achieve energy security. Its current policy to blend ethanol and biodiesel helps the biofuel industry at the cost of food security. In a recent press conference, the Union Food Secretary Sudhanshu Pandey said that in 2020-21 the Centre allocated about 78,000 tonnes of rice from the Food Corporation of India (FCI) stocks to distilleries to produce ethanol. The distilleries got rice at a subsidised Rs.20...
More »Jean Drèze, economist and honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, interviewed by Down to Earth
-Down to Earth The Government of India amended the payment procedure for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) some time ago. Due to this, MGNREGA workers in the states and Union territories faced a delay in their wage payment. This delay came at a time when the second wave of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was wreaking havoc across the country. MGNREGA was started in 2006. Economist and honorary...
More »Doctors warn that current weather conditions and carelessness could aggravate COVID-19 symptoms -Bindu Shajan Perappadan
-The Hindu General public should strictly follow COVID-19 appropriate behaviour to ensure that places with common air conditioning and Poor ventilation do not prove to be a super-spreader zone. The lingering second COVID-19 wave and the current weather — combination of high heat and humidity prevailing across some parts of India — has prompted doctors to caution the general public to strictly follow COVID-19 appropriate behaviour to ensure that places with common...
More »The pandemic in data: How Covid-19 has devastated India’s economy -Swati Dhingra & Maitreesh Ghatak
-Scroll.in The sharp drop in GDP is the largest in the country’s history – and even that may well underestimate the economic damage experienced by the Poorest households. From April to June 2020, India’s GDP dropped by a massive 24.4%. According to the latest national income estimates, in the second quarter of the 2020-’21 financial year (July-September 2020), the economy contracted by a further 7.4%, with the third and fourth quarters (October...
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