-The Indian Express One of the obvious reasons why public healthcare has not been a priority for successive governments of India lies in the fact that India’s middle class did not need it. As epidemiologists tend to consider that the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic may not come before July, the question of the resilience of the Indian health system becomes more pressing, especially in cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad. The...
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How lockdown may rewire class-caste issues for Indian politics -Christophe Jaffrelot & Haider Abbas Rizvi
-The Indian Express The impact of the lockdown may make social issues more prominent again in terms of class, at the expense of caste as well as religious identities and communal tendencies. When interviewed by journalists, several migrant workers badly affected by the COVID-19-related lockdown admitted that they had voted for the BJP in 2019. Indeed, the party attracted poor voters in large numbers during the last Lok Sabha elections, especially among...
More »By revealing magnitude of migrant worker phenomenon, COVID-19 points to rural distress -Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemal Thakker
-The Indian Express According to the 2011 census, 3.5 million migrants who moved within the last one year stated economic reasons for migration. The corresponding numbers for the 2001 and 1991 census, were, respectively, 2.2 and 1.4 million. The COVID-19 crisis is affecting rural India at a time when agriculture is already in a precarious situation. The thousands of migrant workers who have returned to their villages since the lockdown used to...
More »Bank mergers don't address crux of crisis: The nexus between lenders, borrowers and election funding -Christophe Jaffrelot
-The Indian Express To understand what is at stake in the NPA story, one needs first to understand why the public sector banks lent so much money to companies which are today unable to pay it back. India’s economic crisis that is finding expression in low-growth rates and high unemployment rates is partly due to the decline of investments, which is partly due to the fact that companies cannot get access...
More »The problem of skilling India -Christophe Jaffrelot & Vihang Jumle
-The Indian Express India’s employment crisis calls for more government expenditure in education, adequate training. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent Independence Day speech, said, “We need to worry about population explosion”. These words stand in stark contrast to his previous references to India’s demographic dividend where the country’s population was seen as an asset. This shift reflects a new awareness, according to which demography brings a dividend only if...
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