-The Hindu Kerala and Karnataka have shown how democratic decentralisation has worked in their favour Mahatma Gandhi envisioned that a free India would rest on a foundation of gram panchayats, village republics that governed locally and epitomised Swaraj in practice. B.R. Ambedkar was sceptical; he described the caste-ridden, unequal village society as a cesspool. Yet, he was not unequivocally against decentralisation. Locally relevant initiatives The 73rd Constitutional Amendment mandates the constitution of panchayats at...

-Outlook India The expertise the imprisoned doctor offered to the fight against COVID-19 comes from a self-driven struggle with encephalitis, which kills thousands every year The Supreme Court directed on March 23 that all prisoners, under trial or convicted and jailed for less than seven years, be considered for release on a six-week parole, in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. On March 28, Dr Kafeel Ahmed Khan, twice-suspended paediatrician from Gorakhpur...

-TheWire.in India implemented a lockdown 14 days after it recorded 50 cases. The relatively higher number of cases recorded in India may partly be the result of the government losing two precious weeks before implementing any serious physical distancing measures. In part one of this three-part series, we presented a picture of the spread of COVID-19 in four South Asian countries. In the second part, we discuss two issues: How prepared –...

-The Telegraph The Green Revolution revisited The Covid-19 crisis poses many challenges for India. One front that is almost taken for granted. Today, when the world faces the threat of a virus, India as of late April 2020 could declare a food grain reserve of 73.8 million tonnes. Anyone with doubts about gains should take a look at sub-Saharan Africa, many of whose nations are still reliant on food aid from the...

-The Indian Express Cash is easy to carry and widely accepted. But, our analysis of nationally representative survey data, described below, suggests that these transfers will exclude many of India’s poorest and, for others, come too late. The vast majority of India’s poor rely on daily wage labour for sustenance. With the current lockdown and its likely extension, millions of daily labourers and their families can no longer earn the money they...