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…

Avenger Planet:  Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature’s Response to Human Transgression?
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Avenger Planet: Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature’s Response to Human Transgression?

Michael T. Klare As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity. One, widely circulated within right-wing conspiracy circles, is that it originated as a biological weapon developed at a secret Chinese military lab in the city of Wuhan that somehow…

We Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves
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We Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves

Ashish Kothari What an astonishing slap in humanity’s face, this coronavirus. But the silver lining is that it is also a rude wake up call. I say ‘silver lining’, for at the centre of this is a massive humanitarian crisis of illnesses and deaths –  and for working classes who cannot switch to ‘online’ work,…

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…

Why is the U.S. so Exceptionally Vulnerable to Covid-19?
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Why is the U.S. so Exceptionally Vulnerable to Covid-19?

Nicolas J.S. Davies The United States has become the new center of the global coronavirus pandemic, with over 80,000 cases, more than China or Italy. More than a thousand Americans have already died, but this is surely only the very beginning of this deadly collision between the U.S.’s exceptionally inadequate public healthcare system and a…

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…

A Niggardly Response to an Extraordinary Crisis
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A Niggardly Response to an Extraordinary Crisis

C.P. Chandrasekhar In a show of solidarity, some of India’s opposition leaders have declared the much-delayed relief package (titled Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana) announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on March 26 to mitigate the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic on the poor as a welcome “first step”. But any serious scrutiny of the…

Kill GDP to Help Save the Planet
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Kill GDP to Help Save the Planet

Robert Hunziker   There’s a problem with America’s (and we’d like to add, India’s – editor) favourite statistic: GDP. It avoids pretty much everything that’s actually, truly, really good for society, including the importance of robust ecology. Still, it’s the biggest measure of what’s happening with the economy and used around the world, even though…