-The Hindu Instead of embracing the welfare state path, the BJP government is encouraging greater privatisation The novel coronavirus is a global threat, but the pandemic has had an uneven impact across countries and within countries. Historically, social inequality has always been extreme in India. However, the lockdown has sharpened the edges of inequality even further, especially because of the way it has been implemented. Many countries have imposed lockdowns but not...

-The Hindu Nationalism is not going to solve the big problems, says the economist. If the catastrophic human toll of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was the first wave to strike the world this year, its severe economic consequences – including loss of livelihoods of the poor across countries, leading to massive internal displacement and starvation in many cases – have been the second wave. It is in this context that the seminal work...

-TheWire.in The pandemic and the response to it threaten to exacerbate entrenched economic and social disparities. Like most healthcare workers, my profession puts me at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19. Statistically, however, my risk of acquiring a serious infection is reasonably modest and the probability of dying from it quite low. After all, I practice medicine at a premier hospital in the wealthiest nation on this planet and have access to...

-TheWire.in This survey was about wealth and entrepreneurship and free markets and privatisation, not about poverty or inequality or public employment schemes. This is a quick summary review of the latest Economic Survey (2019-20). I have to admit that this quickly-written assessment is a product of an equally quickly-read Survey. If I have not quite pored over it, it is because I found no evidence in the Survey to suggest that it...

-PTI * Oxfam said the combined total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires is higher than the total Union Budget of India for the fiscal year 2018-19 * The report flagged that global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade Davos: India's richest 1 per cent hold more than four-times the wealth held by 953 million people who make up for the bottom 70...