-The Telegraph Unesco and Unicef advisories carry a huge significance for India, where the lockdown has triggered efforts to promote online teaching from primary school to universities New Delhi: Two UN agencies have warned against any large-scale shift towards online education, saying it would deepen socio-economic inequalities and warning that virtual platforms can leave children vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The Unesco and Unicef advisories carry a huge significance for India, where the lockdown...

-The Hindu The State has managed the crisis by building on legacies of egalitarianism, social rights and public trust The global coronavirus pandemic is a natural, albeit brutal experiment. Just about every part of the world has been impacted and the range of responses we are seeing at the national and subnational levels reveal not only existing inequalities but also the political and institutional capacity of governments to respond. Nowhere is this...

-TheWire.in In 'Capital and Ideology', the economist expands his investigations across the globe and over long periods of history to explore the role of ideologies in fuelling inequality. Thomas Piketty made his name in 2014, when his Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an unlikely bestseller. Overnight, he achieved rockstar status – a rarity for an economist. The book seemed to express the outrage against economic inequality, which was making headlines then,...

  A recent report of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) brings forth the dichotomy between digital divide and India’s transition towards a cashless economy. The rural-urban divide in access to computer and internet is quite stark, according to the report entitled 'Key Indicators of Household Social Consumption on Education in India, July 2017 to June 2018'.   The 75th round National Sample Survey (NSS) report on education finds that...

-United Nations Development Programme, released on 9 December, 2019 According to the Human Development Report 2019: Inequalities in Human Development in the 21st Century,  India’s HDI value for 2018 is 0.647— which put the country in the medium human development category—positioning it at 129 out of 189 countries and territories. Between 1990 and 2018, India’s HDI value increased from 0.431 to 0.647, an increase of 50.0 percent. Between 1990 and 2018, India’s...