-National Herald If the disaster that economy is heading towards is to be avoided, there has to be a massive injection of demand by govt both through transfers and through direct spending on goods and services The GDP growth in the first quarter (April-June) of 2020 over the first quarter of the previous year has been minus 24 per cent according to preliminary official estimates. But most knowledgeable people believe that even...

-Press Note by People's Action for Employment Guarantee dated September 10th, 2020 MGNREGA during the pandemic and beyond: Implementation highlights, concerns and questions and demands for parliamentarians We are confronting an unprecedented crisis in the history of modern India. On the one hand, the increasing number of COVID cases point to a dubious distinction for India on the world stage. On the other hand, the unplanned lockdown has resulted in a massive...

-Livemint.com Rural India was battling economic difficulties even before the pandemic. The pandemic-induced lockdown increased hardships even further. The historic contraction in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) figure for the June-ended quarter has raised several questions on what the future holds, and what that contraction has meant for ordinary people. Macro-economic statistics can often fail to capture the diverse realities of a country as large as India, and hence it is useful...

-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...

-ThePrint.in K-shaped recovery means the growing gap between ‘winners and losers’. An example in India is the stock market being healthy while millions have lost their jobs. Amidst the flood of commentary that followed the finding that the world’s fastest-growing large economy had become its fastest-shrinking one, an observation that stood out was that India’s growth potential had dropped from 6 per cent to 5 per cent. Now, it has been obvious...