-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...

-Down to Earth The food most associated with biodiversity loss also tends to also be connected to unhealthy diets across the globe As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths...

-Down to Earth Highest rice acreage in six years, more farmers in farms, a bounty monsoon and an expected bumper harvest don't enthuse farmers as their earning dips   It is a piece of news that everybody would love to cheer about, except those who made this possible. The current kharif season is exceptional. In comparison to last year, over eight million more hectares of farms are under cultivation this season. There are more...

-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,...

-The Hindu The path to a sustained recovery is to improve sentiments in society, using economic tools These are extraordinarily difficult times for our nation and the world. People are gripped with the fear of disease and death from COVID-19. This fear is ubiquitous and transcends geography, religion and class. The inability of nations to control the spread of the novel coronavirus and the lack of a confirmed cure for the disease...