-The Hindu There is a collective culpability in the social crime during the lockdown — of the dispossession of India’s working poor The traumatic months of the National Lockdown lay bare many troubling truths about the profound estrangement of people of privilege from the working poor. They reveal a society in which the privileged are extraordinarily comfortable with inequality, and wanting in elementary empathy and solidarity. They confirm that the veneer of...

-TheIndiaForum.in The lockdown has devastated livelihoods at unprecedented levels, causing widespread job losses and hunger. The measures so far will not solve the crisis. India should universalise the PDS, expand cash transfers, and create a national job guarantee scheme. The Covid-19 global pandemic and its associated containment measures have taken a heavy toll on economies and societies worldwide. In India, the National Lockdown, imposed on 24 March and subsequently extended three times...

-The Hindu Business Line The number of cases of novel coronavirus will increase after Lockdown 4.0 ends, warned V Ravi, Head of Neurovirology, National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), and nodal officer in the Karnataka Health Task Force for Covid-19 cited in the New Indian Express report. “The country has not yet witnessed the spike in cases. The numbers will go up from June onwards after Lockdown 4.0 ends...

-Hindustan Times Less than 57% of the people who sought work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) have received jobs under the programme. At a time when millions of migrant workers who have returned home to the hinterland are looking towards it for a livelihood, the government’s flagship rural jobs programme has got off to a slow start in the new financial year, government data show, amid the...

-TheWire.in There remains a wide chasm between the financial resources committed in budgets and the actual expenditure aimed at providing social security benefits for workers. The unprecedented crisis that the unplanned lockdown pushed workers into has once again forced social activists and researchers to contemplate over whether a legislation passed in 2008 by parliament could have provided relief to workers. Careful scrutiny of the financial resources as committed in budgets and the actual...