-The Tribune Govt must prepare for worst-case scenario as things won’t be resolved on their own In February this year, a restaurateur friend turned optimistic. Business was back to 70 per cent of pre-Covid days and things could only get better. There could be no stronger signal that India’s economy had turned the corner. Experts had predicted that restaurants would be the last places to see a full recovery. They are closed...
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Harsh Mander: A lesson in how to end the mass suffering unleashed by India’s first lockdown -Harsh Mander
-Scroll.in A report by the collective Hunger Watch reveals the extent of continuing hunger caused by state policy, and recommends ways to end the distress. A spectacularly uncaring, unaccountable state has abandoned Indians to their fate. Bodies are piling up, pyres burn late into the night, and corpses are buried in anonymous mass graves. Loved ones are choking to death because their governments failed to secure them oxygen. Vaccines have fallen short...
More »As Covid second wave persists, MGNREGS comes to rural India’s rescue, yet again -Chetan Chauhan
-Hindustan Times The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has witnessed the sharpest year-on-year increase in employment generation in its history in April 2021, government data shows, in a sign that the second Covid wave has caused major reverse migration adding to rural economic distress. According to rural development ministry data, around 22 million households have got work under the job guarantee in the month of April 2021, which is...
More »Modi's Gamble, and How Many Lives It Will Cost -Prem Shankar Jha
-TheWire.in Modi did not want only to prevent a second wave; he wanted all the credit for stopping COVID-19 in its tracks to go to him and him alone. In her heart-rending description of her desperate search for oxygen to save her father’s life, the celebrated TV news anchor Barkha Dutt ascribed his death to three features of governance that have defined Modi’s India: complacency, callousness and incompetence. She could have added...
More »A bullet train to hunger -Dipa Sinha and Rajendran Narayanan
-The Hindu The pandemic has highlighted the importance of expanding social security nets Pinki is a 28-year-old Dalit woman from Saharanpur, U.P. Her husband met with an accident during the national lockdown in April 2020. The two of them had to sell all their belongings for his treatment and subsequently became dependent on her parents. Such avoidable miseries were heaped on millions due to the unilateral national lockdown in 2020. The monthly...
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