-India Spend/ Scroll.in Reservations are not the answer to every social and economic problem. More needs to be done to provide safety nets to vulnerable groups. About 10 crore to 12 crore Indians lost their jobs in the immediate aftermath of the countrywide lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19, IndiaSpend reported in April. But the lockdown has impacted the disadvantaged caste groups with a far greater magnitude than the upper castes, found...

-The Hindu Business Line The government, market and collectives should have worked in tandem to develop resilience of economic institutions during the slowdown in India The sharp downfall in the economic growth rate could be attributable to a lack of resilience of Indian economy. Only fiscal and monetary policies may not halt the downfall of the economy. Collective organisations, including NGOs, have played an important role in consumption and income-smoothing. The downfall...

-The Indian Express To achieve economic growth of 7-8 per cent, the government needs to start addressing some of the traditional sore points such as the large infrastructure deficit, the weak financial sector, archaic land and labour laws, and the administrative and judicial hurdles. India entered the pandemic with declining growth and limited scope for a conventional and large fiscal stimulus. We had noted in an article (IE, January 20, ‘Limited scope...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...

-Down to Earth The food most associated with biodiversity loss also tends to also be connected to unhealthy diets across the globe As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths...