-The Indian Express If we truly want to ensure the livelihoods of our farmers and provide safe, healthy, nutritious food for our consumers, it is imperative to make policies that go beyond the productivity trope and populist posturing. Proponents of the three new farm laws have claimed that they will engender competition in agricultural markets and will give farmers a choice to sell wherever they like. The opponents of these laws, including...

-The Indian Express What is needed is ample income support for households and firms now so that the recovery is not hamstrung by excessively damaged balance sheets Even a cursory reading of Brazil’s recent history will confirm that the adoption of the all-encompassing cap on government spending in late 2016 was critical in rescuing the economy from the crisis of 2014-16. After riding the commodity boom of the 2000s, economic mismanagement and a...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...

-TheWire.in Journalist Seema Chishti interviews the criminology and sociolegal studies scholar about Vikas Dubey's links with the UP police, the Delhi police's investigation of the riots and the custodial death of a father-son duo in Tamil Nadu. Beatrice Jauregui is associate professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is most recently the author of Provisional Authority – Police. Order and Security in India....

-The Hindu There is a collective culpability in the social crime during the lockdown — of the dispossession of India’s working poor The traumatic months of the national lockdown lay bare many troubling truths about the profound estrangement of people of privilege from the working poor. They reveal a society in which the privileged are extraordinarily comfortable with inequality, and wanting in elementary empathy and solidarity. They confirm that the veneer of...