-The Indian Express India should not allow one emergency — the pandemic — to turn into another. Food security problems are not abating and there are clear steps that should be taken before it is too late. In the early days of India’s lockdown, stories of food insecurity were rampant. As “Unlock 2.0” progresses, many analysts hope that labour markets will provide the much needed economic resources to the vulnerable. But amidst...

-The Indian Express While the two-month national lockdown generally dampened spending, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies saw certain unusual trends in demand in certain product categories, company executives said. As India remained locked down in April and May to control the spread of the novel coronavirus, people bought more bread, cheese, coffee, and jams — but less fruity cakes. They expectedly bought a lot of hand sanitisers — but not so expectedly,...

-The Indian Express Heatwaves, floods, droughts: Every decade between 1951-2015 had 7.4 warmer days and 3.1 warmer nights than the annual averages for daily maximum and nightly minimum respectively. The first ‘Assessment of Climate Change over Indian Region’, released by the Ministry of Earth Sciences recently, warns of tropical cyclones, thunderstorms, heat waves, floods and droughts in India unless mitigation measures are adopted soon. The projections are for the decades leading to...

-The Indian Express The state government’s daily health bulletin then showed how migrants accounted for more than half of the positive cases. in the ongoing surge in cases in Bihar, the numbers tell a different story. Patna: When migrants started returning to Bihar on Shramik special trains, private vehicles and even on foot, the state government had raised an alarm about the potential spread of infection and started quarantining them. The state government’s...

-Hindustan Times The state government launched ‘Rozgar Setu’ web portal on June 10 to bring the migrant labourers and employers/job providers on a common platform so that the latter could choose the workforce as per their requirement. Bhopal: Nearly 5 percent of 7.30 lakh migrant labourers have got jobs and the biggest employers of these 35,000 odd labourers are village panchayats, not the private sector, shows Madhya Pradesh government’s data. The state government...