-The Hindu Second wave of COVID-19 forced vulnerable women to take high risk loans beyond their repaying capacity Kolkata: Months after she was rescued, 16-year-old Asma, a resident of Sunderbans in South 24 Parganas, took a loan of ₹20,000 from local moneylenders in May 2020 to rebuild her life. The first wave of COVID-19 had made it difficult to get any work. A year later, in May 2021, Ms. Asma, who was...
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With its economic policy, the government confronts political risks -Roshan Kishore
-Hindustan Times Those sympathetic to the establishment argue that had it not been for the second wave, the economy would have been in a much better shape. Those who disagree claim that even the sequential recovery which was achieved was profit-led and inequality-generating in nature On June 28, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced an economic package to deal with the adverse effects of the second wave of the pandemic. The contours of...
More »The Poverty of Economic Conservatism -Prabhat Patnaik
-NetworkIdeas.org In terms of economic policy, the Modi government must be perhaps the most conservative in the world. During the entire period of the pandemic when millions of people lost their incomes and livelihood support, most governments around the world provided universal cash transfers to the people, but not the Modi government. True, many other third world countries too did not provide such universal cash transfers, but their hands were tied;...
More »How India's Financial Inclusion Infrastructure Failed During the Pandemic -Isabelle Guérin, Nithya Joseph and G Venkatasubramanian
-TheWire.in Despite the fact that India's financial inclusion infrastructure has a complex mix of self-help groups and small private banks offering credit to the poor, it has failed to deliver during the pandemic. When the pandemic struck, policymakers and prominent economists across the world called for financial infrastructures to be strengthened. They argued this would support the efficient channeling of relief through cash transfers or cheap loans. India was no exception to...
More »'We exhausted our savings to pay the hospital' -Parth MN
-RuralIndiaOnline.org Poor public infrastructure, unaffordable private medical care and limited access to the state health insurance scheme are pushing Covid patients and their families into long-term Debt in Marathwada Eight days after testing positive for Covid-19, Ramling Sanap died in the hospital where he was being treated for the infection. But it wasn’t the virus that killed him. A few hours before he died, Ramling, 40, had phoned his wife, Rajubai, from the...
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