-The Tribune Govt must prepare for worst-case scenario as things won’t be resolved on their own In February this year, a restaurateur friend turned optimistic. Business was back to 70 per cent of pre-Covid days and things could only get better. There could be no stronger signal that India’s economy had turned the corner. Experts had predicted that restaurants would be the last places to see a full recovery. They are closed...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-The Hindu The pandemic has highlighted the importance of expanding social security nets Pinki is a 28-year-old Dalit woman from Saharanpur, U.P. Her husband met with an accident during the national lockdown in April 2020. The two of them had to sell all their belongings for his treatment and subsequently became dependent on her parents. Such avoidable miseries were heaped on millions due to the unilateral national lockdown in 2020. The monthly...

-The Hindu Technological changes in education and health are worsening inequities Virginia Eubanks’ widely acclaimed book, Automating Inequality, alerted us to the ways that automated decision-making tools exacerbated inequalities, especially by raising the barrier for people to receive services they are entitled to. The novel coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the use of digital technologies in India, even for essential services such as health and education, where access to them might be poor. Economic...

-Hindustan Times Studies on migrants, domestic workers, and jobs put off till situation improves. The delay may have an adverse impact on the proposed national employment policy. The Union government has suspended work on four key Surveys on migrants, domestic workers, and jobs created by the transport sector and professionals because of the deadly second wave of the pandemic, possibly delaying a national employment policy based on these Surveys. With lockdowns and curfews...