-TheWire.in In the month of April 2020, 34 lakh households were provided work compared to 1.7 crore in April of 2019, a decline of 86%. New Delhi: Only 20% of the number of people who were provided work in April 2019 were employed in April 2020 under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), according to official Government data. In the month of April 2020, 34 lakh households were provided work...

-Newsclick.in Over 14 crore persons have lost their jobs since the lockdown began a month ago. Over 26% of the workforce in India is without any job thus posing a dire threat to the social fabric and creating unbearable misery for millions. This is the estimate from the latest round  (April 19) of weekly sample surveys carried out by Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The data shows joblessness zooming up after...

-Press release by Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch dated 26th April, 2020 A large number of civil society organisations came forward to respond quickly to the lockdown-induced hunger crisis among the informal sector workers in Gurgaon. Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch (GNEM), an organisation working among the unorganised workers, started distributing an average of 350 ration kits per day since 27th March, 2020, the third day of the lockdown, and about 25,000 cooked...

-The Telegraph The pandemic has given surveillance tools legitimacy in the eyes of civil society which at other times might have been more concerned about privacy issues Among the “seven” to-dos that Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed for the country on April 13 while announcing the extension of a nationwide lockdown was a call for citizens to download the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app. It would help “prevent the spread of [the] corona infection,”...

Most reports and studies by official agencies, international think tanks and private entities indicate the cataclysmic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy and society. They anticipate that lockdowns imposed by various countries across the globe to reduce the exponential diffusion of COVID-19 (i.e. for flattening the curve by social distancing and quarantines) would adversely affect economic growth and disrupt supply chains in most sectors, on top of causing...