-Livemint.com Fake news linking the spread of Covid-19 to chickens have cost the Indian poultry market over ₹1.6 billion a day. The world’s fourth biggest chicken producer now faces its worst crisis in a decade In the first week of February, Somnath Shelke, a poultry farmer in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar, started receiving text messages on WhatsApp that baffled him. “Broiler chicken me korona virus ko paya gaya hai," one of them said. “Tamam logo...

-The Telegraph The large-scale unemployment the pandemic was set to cause would cost workers between $860 billion and $3.4 trillion in income losses Several workers’ organisations have demanded a special package to tide workers over the income slump entailed by coronavirus-induced social distancing and economic slowdown, at a time the International Labour Organisation has predicted a loss of 25 million jobs globally. An initial assessment by the ILO said the impact could be...

-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...

-The Tribune Proposed Bill needs to make the industry pay for health damages AMIDST a hurricane of lawsuits that agrochemical multinational Bayer-Monsanto faces in the US and elsewhere over its herbicides Roundup and Dicamba’s alleged link to cancer, a joint investigation by Unearthed, a journalists’ research group founded by Swiss NGO Public Eye and Greenpeace UK, found that India tops the global chart with nearly 59 per cent of the sales being...

-Down to Earth This is because agriculture in India is largely dependent on chemicals including pesticides and their usage has a huge impact on the health of humans, animals, bio-diversity and the environment Pesticides are regulated in India through the Insecticides Act, 1968 and Insecticides Rules, 1971. The experience in administering this Act over the last five decades has exposed certain gaps which spurred the need to propose a new law. The Pesticide...