-Livemint.com * A prolonged lockdown will hurt farmers about to harvest the winter crop and the landless living on daily wages * Continued disruption in the food supply chain will eventually hit consumers if prices vary widely across regions. This uncertainty has also hit 70 mn households in rural India who own small dairies NEW DELHI: Baburao Sanap has no clue how to pull himself out of a big mess —he’s saddled with...

-Livemint.com * One fallout of the containment measures is that children have to do without the guaranteed school meal * Anganwadi workers have been directed to anganwadi centres only to receive take-home ration NEW DELHI: Unaware of the covid-19 pandemic, four-year-old Jamuni, a malnourished girl in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh, is worried that her primary school has been closed for the last 20 days. Her worry revolves around missing the mid-day meals...

-Scroll.in This is an important reminder that policies with a 120 million-person hole at the heart of them are flawed. India’s chaotic attempt to go into a lockdown to combat the coronavirus has had an unusual side-effect: it has the attention of the elites, ensconced in their homes during the three-week period, to the plight of the country’s massive migrant labour population. The Central government’s failure to adequately plan forced hundreds of thousands...

-The Hindu The government must ensure that the spectre of SARS-CoV-2 is not replaced by the spectre of hunger The Central government has asked States to seal borders to prevent lakhs of workers, who have been rendered jobless overnight with no guarantee of wages and shelter, from reaching their villages. The workers are to be herded into quarantine zones. These atrocious actions amount to a mass criminalisation of the labour force of...

-Scroll.in One man suffered a heart attack while walking along the Agra highway. Some others, including children, were killed in road accidents. Thousands of migrant workers have been trying to get home, with many of them attempting to cross state borders, amid the 21-day lockdown imposed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. Many of them have died. While the deaths of at least 22 such migrants are documented, the actual...