-The Hindu The State has managed the crisis by building on legacies of egalitarianism, social rights and public trust The global coronavirus pandemic is a natural, albeit brutal experiment. Just about every part of the world has been impacted and the range of responses we are seeing at the national and subnational levels reveal not only existing inequalities but also the political and institutional capacity of governments to respond. Nowhere is this...

-Scroll.in Food distress is acute among migrant and working-class families. Bhalswa is home to Delhi’s largest open garbage dump – and working-class families who can’t afford to live in a less toxic place. Around noon on Saturday, a queue snaked around a bend in the road leading into the neighbourhood. Food was being distributed inside a community hall by the Shri Shiv Sevak Delhi Mahashakti Group, an organisation that runs kitchens during...

-The Indian Express Officials from the district administration also insisted the 35-year-old was “mentally disturbed”. Gurgaon (Haryana): On Thursday morning, 35-year-old Chhabu Mandal, a migrant from Bihar who worked as a painter in Gurgaon, sold his phone for Rs 2,500 and used the money to purchase a portable fan and some ration to feed his family — his wife, her parents, and his four children, the youngest five months old. His wife Poonam...

-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...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org ASHA workers in Haryana’s Sonipat district have been pushed to the frontlines of the fight against Covid-19 in a later-than-last-minute attempt to control a pandemic – with no safety gear and very little training Sonipat, Haryana: “Now, we must visit at least 25 households every day, each house at least four times in a month,” Sunita Rani says, “to survey for the coronavirus.” She has been making these rounds for over...