-The Hindu Nationalism is not going to solve the big problems, says the economist. If the catastrophic human toll of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was the first wave to strike the world this year, its severe economic consequences – including loss of livelihoods of the poor across countries, leading to massive internal displacement and starvation in many cases – have been the second wave. It is in this context that the seminal work...

-TheWire.in In each of the four large South Asian nations, the response of the state to the pandemic has been shaped by long standing and underlying political faultlines. In parts one and two of this article, we have discussed the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, preparedness (in terms of health infrastructure), and the government’s public health responses to the pandemic in four South Asian countries. In this concluding part, we discuss two...

-CaravanMagazine.in On 17 May, for the third time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Narendra Modi administration extended India’s lockdown—one of the harshest across the world. For the third time, the Indian government did so without seeking scientific inputs from a national task force constituted to advise the central government on its pandemic response, according to multiple members of the team of scientists. There was a consensus among members we spoke...

-Mongabay.com * The COVID-19 pandemic has shown up major fault lines in our development trajectory and one of the issues is how we account for growth and progress with the gross national product (GNP) calculated as a single bottom line, without paying heed to the ecological, environmental and social costs. * Air and water pollution have been shown to add a significant cost to India’s GNP. A greener GNP will take these...

-Livemint.com * Roughly 100 million migrant workers are directly responsible for 10% of the GDP. Why are they still so invisible? * There has been an unwillingness to collect better data on circular migrants and understand how they affect the economy. This is shocking for a country that runs on migrant labour BRIGHTON/ LONDON: Images of stranded migrants and their long arduous journeys back home will remain seared in our collective memories of...