-The Hindu On inflation, the Chief Economic Adviser said it is expected to be range-bound and should not exceed the prescribed level. India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 7.3% in 2020-21, as per provisional National Income estimates released by the National Statistical Office on Monday, marginally better than the 8% contraction in the economy projected earlier. GDP growth in 2019-20, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, was 4%. The Gross Value Added (GVA)...
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Covid-19 and the disease of inequality -Yamini Aiyar
-Hindustan Times The second wave will deepen inequality. Expand support to states, universalise PDS, and ramp up MGNREGS now Abandoned by the State that insisted on locking down, refusing to recognise the damage done to their livelihoods, India’s workers asserted their rights and made themselves heard by walking home in March 2020. The long march home was emblematic of the suffering and hardship unleashed by the first wave. A year later, it is...
More »2020 lockdown shut 11% women MSMEs, only 1% got back on feet with govt help, finds study -Nilanjana Bargotra, Kartikeya Bhatotia, M P Karthick and Mridulya Narasimhan
-ThePrint.in Krea University researchers surveyed 2,083 non-agricultural enterprises in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha to examine the impact of Covid-19 on women-led MSMEs. Survey of women-based MSME entrepreneurs In an effort to examine the impact of Covid-19 on women-led micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), we surveyed 2,083 non-agricultural enterprises across four states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. Specifically, the survey reached rural women entrepreneurs in the intervening period when the...
More »Why ‘excess mortality’ figures for Covid must be calculated -Chinmay Tumbe
-The Indian Express They will not only help capture the true scale of the tragedy, but will also help in planning better for the next waves of the pandemic. In his memoirs, the writer Suryakant Tripathi (1896-1961), better known as Nirala, described the river Ganga as “swollen with dead bodies” when the deadly second wave of the influenza pandemic struck India in 1918. The pandemic was a deeply traumatic experience for him,...
More »A collage of laws that leaves the worker out in the cold -Santosh Mehrotra and Kingshuk Sarkar
-The Hindu The universalisation of social security remains an unfulfilled aspiration in the new code on social security As COVID-19 destroys lives and livelihoods, an unprepared government has rendered low-paid, informal workers, who constitute 91% of the workforce, totally hapless, pushing them further into poverty. Imagine if these same informal workers had social security (including free basic curative care in public clinics and hospitals, the elderly had old age pensions, the dying...
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