-Newsclick.in Release of the draft during a lockdown, which seeks to fundamentally changes India’s environmental regulations, shows BJP government’s utter disdain for public opinion. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) had released a Draft Notification on Environment Impact Assessment 2020 (EIA Notification 2020) on March 12, 2020, on the eve of the world’s largest nationwide lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and had called for responses in the next...

-Hindustan Times To enable their return to cities, improve wages, living conditions, safety net. Coercion won’t work Migrant workers are like nowhere people. Yet, they are everywhere. From high-rises to highways, who builds them? It is a silent army of migrant workers, working day and night with no job security, no social safety net, and poor living conditions — yet, theirs are not the names we see on the billboards or the...

-Scroll.in The migrant exodus will undoubtedly hurt the economy. But that is no excuse for forced labour. The Indian government’s policies towards its vulnerable migrant worker population were already a mess. This week, Karnataka made it worse. The Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state decided to cancel trains that would allow working-class people from other states to return to their homes five weeks after a national lockdown to combat Covid-19 left them stranded, often without...

-The Hindu Business Line Trade body says government should focus on boosting oilseeds output for self-sufficiency Bengaluru: As demand takes a beating and imports slump amidst a bearish price trend, the edible oil sector feels the Centre should launch the national mission on edible oilseeds to boost domestic production and achieve self-sufficiency. India depends on imports to meet about 70 per cent of its edible oil requirement, estimated at around 23 million tonnes....

-The Indian Express Diverting rice to produce ethanol during the pandemic is unethical. Surplus grains should be used to feed those in distress. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and a country-wide lockdown came an announcement that was difficult to believe. The press release said the National Biofuel Coordination Committee (NBCC) chaired by the Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas has decided to use “surplus” rice available with the Food...