-The Hindu Disruptions in the supply chain and panic buying can lead to price spikes: Hans Timmer In a report released this month, the World Bank has predicted a ‘dire’ situation for South Asia due to the economic impact of measures to counter the novel coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that the eight SAARC countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka) will experience their worst economic performance in 40 years,...

Most reports and studies by official agencies, international think tanks and private entities indicate the cataclysmic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy and society. They anticipate that lockdowns imposed by various countries across the globe to reduce the exponential diffusion of COVID-19 (i.e. for flattening the curve by social distancing and quarantines) would adversely affect economic growth and disrupt supply chains in most sectors, on top of causing...

-The Hindu The trend across developing countries is to give State governments as much discretion as possible India urgently needs to increase fiscal support for COVID-19 relief and rebuilding. Among comparable developing countries with similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, India has spent the least as a share of its GDP. While the Central government has announced measures amounting to 0.8% of GDP, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that State-level relief...

-The Indian Express Officials said 24 such families had approached them in Surjamata alone, a village of 150 families. Most people here work as daily wagers, owning no land and barely any possessions. Purulia (West Bengal): Bordering Jharkhand, the district of Purulia in West Bengal has zero cases of coronavirus. However, that is not the only COVID-19 story here. With the state government announcing free ration under PDS for six months to...

-The Indian Express Amartya Sen, Raghuram Rajan, Abhijit Banerjee write: As it becomes clear that the lockdown will go on for quite a while, the biggest worry right now, by far, is that a huge number of people will be pushed into dire poverty or even starvation by the combination of the loss of their livelihoods and interruptions in the standard delivery mechanisms. We in India worry a lot about the possible...