-The Hindu The SOFI report and lockdown distress have renewed focus on what is also the world’s largest food insecure population Data from the latest edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report show that India retains the dubious distinction of being the country with the largest population of food insecure people. Estimates presented in the report which was released by several United Nations organisations show...
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Reimagining India’s welfare toolkit -Yamini Aiyar
-Hindustan Times Universalise PDS, make it demand-driven; give more funds to states; and ramp up MGNREGS I pen this column with a depressing sense of deja vu. Back in late March as India went into lockdown, I wrote in these pages of the urgent need for the State to change the rules of the game, avoid red tape, improve Centre-state coordination and adapt agile administrative processes as it sought to provide relief...
More »For the first time, farm sector set to grow even as GDP sees a contraction -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express The country’s GDP registered an annual decline, at minus 5.2%, last in 1979-80. But that year also recorded negative growth for agricultural GDP, at minus 12.8%. April-June may be the first time that India’s economy would contract year-on-year since the government started coming out with quarterly estimates of GDP from 1996-97. But the data for the quarter, to be released by the National Statistical Office on August 31, could...
More »Not possible to fully block Chinese companies, say officials -Dinakar Peri
-The Hindu “While some measures can be taken, several Chinese investments are quite substantive. It is not possible to fully block them. A worrisome factor is that these Chinese companies have linkages of some sort with the Chinese military,” one government official said on condition of anonymity. Despite the uproar against the use of Chinese products amid the standoff on the border in eastern Ladakh and the government’s decision to ban several...
More »No Internet, school comes home in rural Sikkim -Esha Roy
-The Indian Express While the Sikkim government has launched the Sikkim Edutech App to help students from Class 9-12 cope with the learning loss, it's the junior students and those in far flung areas who were left with little support. Sometime in April, with Covid forcing schools shut, Indra Mukhi Chhetri, a maths and science teacher in a rural area of South Sikkim district, began worrying about her students. While schools were...
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