'For the past five months, Trupti Kamle has been torn between two difficult choices: either saving money for her son’s education or ensuring that he is fed well. The reason for her dilemma is something that has been plaguing households across India in recent months – unprecedented food inflation. A domestic worker from suburban Mumbai, Kamle has always kept aside half of her income – currently Rs 12,000 a month – as savings for her six-year-old son.
'A 43- year old Dalit man was attacked by a group of 'upper caste' men in Greater Noida for selling biryani in ‘their area’. Lokesh Jatav, who was badly beaten up by the assailants also saw casteist slurs being hurled against him. A video of the incident that took place in Rabapura, 66 km from Delhi was widely shared on social media showed the man standing back to the wall, being slapped by a man shouting abuses and calling him names, demanding he apologize for being there...
'As Jharkhand votes – in five phases from 30 November to December 20 and results on December 23 – to elect a new government, some of the state’s poorest citizens cannot access food grains due to a drive between 2014 and 2018 to weed out fake beneficiaries from the PDS. The solution has entailed a dependence on technology that shuts out beneficiaries, sometimes illegally... Of the state’s 33 million people, 71% or 23.3 million, are directly dependent on the PDS system. In the past five years, the PDS system has often failed the state’s most vulnerable.
'The BJP’s Ashwini Choubey, Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, has claimed that he is unaware of the onion crisis in the country because he is “a vegetarian and has never tasted an onion”. This comes a day after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a statement in Parliament that she “comes from a family that does not consume much onion and garlic”. Sitharaman’s comment invited heavy trolling online and prompted the viral hashtag #SayItLikeNirmalaTai. “I am a vegetarian. How will a person like me know about the shortage and price of onions?” Choubey told news agency ANI.
'Claimants are given a 12-digit number linked to their data, and if something goes wrong they can be refused food... Motka Manjhi had been back and forth to the ration shop four or five times, his wife said, but on each occasion he returned empty-handed. His thumbprint, needed to prove his identity, wasn’t registering on the new system.
'Aadhaar-based biometric authentication failures continue to deprive the poor ration card holders of their grain entitlements under the public distribution system (PDS). They have to face hassles (often leading to denial of ration) due to the mandatory procedure. Under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), every household below the poverty line is entitled to 5 kgs of grain for each member registered on the card every month at nominal prices (35 kgs per household for Antyodaya cardholders). However, ration has not been distributed in some villages for several months.
'A legendary South Asian dish has suddenly found itself in the midst of a war in India. Made up of layers of meat and rice and cooked with fragrant spices, the dish is the much-loved biryani. And the latest battlefield is in the northern Indian state of Haryana. The police there have been collecting biryani samples from households and shops in Muslim districts like Mewat, to check if the meat in the biryani is beef – the consumption of which is anathema to many Hindus.
'Taking advantage of the skewed pricing policy of successive governments both at the Centre and at the state level, rice mill owners across India have been literally milling thousands of crores of rupees for themselves through the sale of paddy by-products left over from the rice they process for the public distribution system (PDS). The by-products of rice milling are bran, husk, broken rice and nooks which enjoy a lucrative market – giving millers high returns on something which they do not have to spend a single rupee to buy. They get them for free...
'The fears are coming true. Earlier this year, activists had warned the Modi government that its decision to slash funds for India’s oldest supplementary nutrition scheme for vulnerable women and children would prove a disaster. But the government paid little heed. Now the ripples are being felt on the ground. Children aren’t getting their hot meals regularly, nor are grassroots workers receiving their wages on time.
'The instant noodles brand launched by yoga teacher Ramdev has not obtained mandatory product approvals from the Food Safety and Regulatory Authority of India, officials said, even though Patanjali Atta Noodles packets display an “FSSAI licence number”. “Patanjali Atta Noodles has not got product approvals from us. The matter has been brought to our notice. We are pursuing it,” Ashish Bahuguna, FSSAI chairperson who also holds additional charge as its CEO, told The Indian Express...'
