Newslaundry In 2018, when Rekha Waghmare was 39 years old, her husband died by suicide. Namdev, 42, was among over 12,000 farmers who died by suicide in Maharashtra from 2015 to 2018, struggling with five years of crop failure. He left behind Rekha, their two children, a 3.5 acre farm, and an unpaid loan of Rs 4 lakh. Rekha, who lives in Nandusa village in Hingoli district, turned to farming and daily...

-Moneycontrol.com The free and subsidised grains are an implicit income transfer to people and ensure basic protection from starvation The distribution of free grains through the Public Distribution System (PDS) under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) has been one of the main relief measures undertaken by the Indian government in response to the economic distress brought about by the Covid pandemic. From April 2020 until the end of 2022,...

-The Hindu The Centre’s taking up the burden for free food grain distribution in 2023 will provide relief to States The Government has decided not to extend the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, (PMGKY), a scheme that ran between April 2020 to December 2022 (except for a short period in between), and provided additional allocation of food grains, i.e., rice or wheat from the central pool at five kilograms a month...

-The Hindu Business Line The National Food Security Act could adopt standardised criteria to identify beneficiaries across States/UTs India’s development report cards have long been plagued by high incidence of malnutrition, making it an often-cited example of the nation’s growth conundrum. With the country being home to more than one-third of undernourished children, it is evident that the problem underlines the need for a targeted and multi-sectoral approach, with the benefits of...

-The Telegraph At present, India has 195 million households with ration cards (nearly 794 million people), lower than the beneficiaries we intended to target in 2013 Inordinate delays in carrying out the census exercise are depriving millions of Indians who rely on rations for their subsistence. The exclusion of the poorest from the public distribution system in the pre and post-pandemic years was first flagged by the economists, Jean Drèze and Reetika...