-NDTV The Prime Minister's National Relief Fund (PMNRF), which was set up in 1948, is not audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) either. New Delhi: The Prime Minister's Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations or PM CARES Fund, formed amid the coronavirus crisis to be a war chest for national crises, will not be audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), sources told NDTV...
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Migrant hunger and lockdown games -Amrita Johri and Anjali Bhardwaj
-The Hindu Business Line The government is seen doing very little to mitigate the woes of the thousands of migrant workers who have been pushed to the brink of starvation by the lockdown * Post the Covid-19 lockdown, unorganised sector migrant labourers have been unable to afford even two square meals a day * 78 per cent of workers surveyed said they had less than ₹300 * Economic relief packages such as PMGKY have...
More »Mission Journal: Journalists in India’s Uttar Pradesh say threat of attack or prosecution looms large -Kunal Majumder
-Committee to Protect Journalists On March 26, two days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national lockdown to control the spreading of COVID-19, Hindi-language daily Jansandesh Times reported that a tribe in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh state, didn’t have enough to eat due to the sudden announcement and that children were eating grass. The same day, the magistrate of Varanasi district, Kaushal Raj Sharma, sent a legal notice to the...
More »Big Brother is watching -Charu Sudan Kasturi
-The Telegraph The pandemic has given surveillance tools legitimacy in the eyes of civil society which at other times might have been more concerned about privacy issues Among the “seven” to-dos that Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed for the country on April 13 while announcing the extension of a nationwide lockdown was a call for citizens to download the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app. It would help “prevent the spread of [the] corona infection,”...
More »Agricultural Supply Chains during the COVID-19 Lockdown -Vikas Rawal and Ankur Verma
-Society for Social and Economic Research The sudden announcement of a national lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in a severe disruption of food supply chains. The lockdown was announced without any preparation, and nothing was mentioned about excluding agricultural production and marketing operations from the purview of the lockdown when the Prime Minister first announced these restrictions. Once the lockdown was announced, governments scrambled to keep the...
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