Food and Nutrition

COVID-19 has unleashed one of the greatest human tragedies of the contemporary era demonstrating our fragility and has laid bare severe and systemic inequalities at all levels. It provides several lessons in the conduct of all aspects of human personality, professional, societal, and institutional lives globally.

India has seen large scale rural-urban migration of people trying to escape rural distress in the last few decades.

India is the second largest tea producer in the world, with production at 1.2 million metric tons

The Amphan cyclone has disfigured the lives of people living in the Sundarbans. Houses have been torn apart, farms have been filled with brackish water making the land unsuitable for farming and betel leaves have been destroyed. People in the Sundarbans are in a life-threatening situation with makeshift shacks to live in and no means to earn a living.

Uncertainty - the pervasive feeling that all of us have been living with from the middle of March 2020. It's the same in our partner villages in Odisha and Jharkhand. Communities we work with have been facing and overcoming uncertainties all through their lives. But this time, the crisis has put unusual stress on their abilities to cope.

As the Covid-19 pandemic was leaving deep scars around the globe, it forced governments to take measures to protect citizens and ensure food security for its people. In India, initially, it looked as if the remote rural areas would skirt the pandemic.

Bihar’s annual floods are right around the corner and there is a fear that the flood hazard will collide with the Covid-19 pandemic and amplify it in a manner that emergency responses to both will get disrupted. The state’s strategy to mitigate the effects of flooding needs to be updated in light of the deadly pandemic.

Jharkhand is a state dominated by tribal communities located in eastern part of India. Agriculture, NTFP (Non-timber forest produce) collection and daily wage laborers are the prime source of income for rural Jharkhand.

Suddenly thrown out of work by a nationwide lockdown, the migrants who built our cities and our economies were forced to take the torturous walk away from the cities to their homes in rural India.

With an attempt to contain the spread of deadly Covid-19, Indian government had announced a complete nation-wide lockdown from March 25 onwards. For the first time, the provisions of the National Disaster Management Act, 2005, were invoked since the law came into being after the 2004 tsunami.