-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...

-The Hindu Addressing poverty is the key to improving the health and nutritional status of mothers and their infants From the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day, the Prime Minister declared that the government is considering raising the legal age of marriage for girls, which is currently 18 years. He said, “We have formed a committee to ensure that daughters are no longer suffering from malnutrition and they are married...

-Hindustan Times Dungarpur: India’s rural employment guarantee scheme is falling short in helping residents tide over the economic distress caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown restrictions, data from Rajasthan suggest. Nearly 43% households who took up work under the scheme in Dungarpur, a largely tribal district in southern Rajasthan, had completed more than 50 of their 100 days of work in the first four months of the current financial...

-The Hindu A decision on this can be taken only when the pandemic begins to subside. The world is still struggling to come to terms with the unprecedented impact that COVID-19 has had on every aspect of human life. The pandemic has forced cities and towns to go into lockdowns. The attendant side effects — including the rather sudden withdrawal of certain social support services — have affected large groups of people....

-The Hindu Business Line/ NetworkIdeas.org Now that India has already overtaken Brazil among countries with the most number of Covid-19 positive cases and is on the verge of even beating the USA, it’s worth trying to understand what has led to this inability to control the pandemic in India. One of the arguments often made is that India, being a developing country with a large poor population engaged in informal work,...