India’s Power Grid Survived ‘Diya Jalao’, Only Thanks to Drastic Action Behind the Scenes
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India’s Power Grid Survived ‘Diya Jalao’, Only Thanks to Drastic Action Behind the Scenes

  K. Ashok Rao As on August 31, 2019, India had one of the largest operational synchronous grids in the world, with 360.78 GW of installed power generation capacity. The famous blackout of July 30 and 31, 2012, was the largest power outage in India. It affected more than 620 million people – half the…

India’s Unemployment Rate May Have Shot Up to 23% After COVID-19 Lockdown: CMIE
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India’s Unemployment Rate May Have Shot Up to 23% After COVID-19 Lockdown: CMIE

  Courtesy: The Wire Staff The national lockdown may have led to significant job losses across the country, with the overall unemployment rate hitting over 23% in the last week of March 2020, according to estimates put out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). India currently does not have official high-frequency employment data….

Coronavirus Pandemic: The Policies We Need to Be Ready for the Long Haul
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Coronavirus Pandemic: The Policies We Need to Be Ready for the Long Haul

  Abhinash Borah, Sabyasachi Das, Aparajita Dasgupta, Ashwini Deshpande, Kanika Mahajan, Bharat Ramaswami, Anuradha Saha, Anisha Sharma There is a lot that is unknown about SARS-COV-2, but the world’s leading epidemiologists believe that its spread will be a long-drawn process. It will take at least 18 months for a vaccine to become available, and even…

Concerned Citizens’ Response to FM’s COVID 19 Relief Package
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Concerned Citizens’ Response to FM’s COVID 19 Relief Package

Courtesy: The Caravan, 27 March 2020 Emergency measures proposed and endorsed by 635 people only half-met Finance Minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman has announced a 1.7 lakh crore package to deal with the economic fallout of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. While we welcome that the Union Government is finally addressing this issue, it would have been…

What Doesn’t Add Up in Nirmala Sitharaman’s Relief Package for India’s Poor
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What Doesn’t Add Up in Nirmala Sitharaman’s Relief Package for India’s Poor

Kabir Agarwal, Anuj Srivas How impactful will finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s relief package for India’s poorest actually end up being? The Narendra Modi government unveiled the contours of the Rs 1.7 lakh crore package on Thursday, with a promise that it was for people who needed immediate help – like migrant workers, and the urban…

Two Days Into Lockdown, Sitharaman Announces Rs 1.7 Lakh Crore Package to Help Poorest
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Two Days Into Lockdown, Sitharaman Announces Rs 1.7 Lakh Crore Package to Help Poorest

The Wire Staff, 26 March 2020 Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a much-awaited relief package for India’s poor and migrant workers, who have been hit hardest by the 21-day national lockdown that is aimed at tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. The ‘Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan’ scheme, worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore or slightly less…

Some Basic Lessons from the Pandemic
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Some Basic Lessons from the Pandemic

Prabhat Patnaik, March 22, 2020 The coronavirus attack has so far been much less deadly than the Spanish flu of a century ago. That had affected 500 million people worldwide, about 27 per cent of the world’s population of the time, and had a death rate of about 10 per cent among those affected. (Estimates…

Reverse Migration: Why the Long March Home?
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Reverse Migration: Why the Long March Home?

Devinder Sharma, March 31, 2020 “It was poverty that forced me to leave my village, and here I am … I still have no money,” said Sanjay Choudhary, a construction worker in Nagpur, after he undertook an arduous journey to return back to his native village in Garhwa district in Jharkhand, covering a distance of…

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Coronavirus: Why isn’t Indian Media Asking Hard Questions of the Government?

Kalpana Sharma The prime minister orders and a country of 1.3 billion people obeys. That is the extraordinary spectacle we are witnessing after the televised announcement by Narendra Modi that all of India would go into complete lockdown for 21 days from midnight on March 24 in order to contain the spread of COVID-19. Fortunately,…

A Pandemic in an Unequal India
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A Pandemic in an Unequal India

Harsh Mander If the COVID-19 pandemic lashes India with severity, it will not be just the middle class who will be affected. India’s impoverished millions are likely to overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the suffering which will ensue. The privileged Indian has been comfortable for too long with some of the most unconscionable inequalities in…