In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-Economic and Political Weekly Editorial India has to substantially scale up its health infrastructure to protect lives and livelihoods. “The situation in India is a devastating reminder of what the virus can do,” said World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a virtual briefing in Geneva last week. He was speaking in the context of the WHO survey findings which noted that one year into the COVID-19 pandemic around 90%...

-The Hindu The role of planning and social oversight in the economic development of the State needs to expand further Will the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) be re-elected in the upcoming polls in Kerala, or will the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) return to lead the government? The election results will have a major bearing on the path of development that the State would take in the coming years. While Kerala’s achievements...

-The Hindu Labourers from West Bengal, Assam have gone home to exercise their franchise Kochi: Kabir Ahmad (name changed), a migrant worker in Perumbavoor, had to spend a small fortune on a flight ticket to return home to Hojai district of Assam last month following his parents’ anguished plea to get back in time for voting. Their desperation was borne out of the perceived danger posed to the community by the National...

-The Hindu The political emphasis on welfare interventions is insufficient to address the emerging developmental issues in the State A major concern in contemporary Indian development is the widening socio-economic disparity across groups and regions. Even when regions perform relatively better in one developmental dimension, it does not often translate into all round development. For instance, Himachal Pradesh and Kerala might have attained better levels of Human Development but that has not...