Lebanese Portents
The tragic events unfolding in Lebanon are a portent of things to come for the entire third world. Lebanon, a small, highly import-dependent country, has been in the grip of an economic crisis for quite some time as the world…
WTO is Using COVID for its Expansionist Free Trade Agenda
As the world is reeling under the deaths and exponential spread of the COVID pandemic, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is busy negotiating a free trade deal in electronic medical equipments. One of the five proposals made to the WTO's…
Detainees during the Pandemic
It is a common practice all over the world that when those incarcerated face a threat to life, the authorities send them home. Even Benito Mussolini had been forced by an international campaign to shift the Italian Communist Leader Antonio…
Covid-19: Why is India doing worse than other South Asian countries?
Now that India has already overtaken Brazil among countries with the most number of Covid-19 positive cases and is on the verge of even beating the USA, it’s worth trying to understand what has led to this inability to control…
GST under Strain
The Finance Minister of Kerala, Thomas Isaac, has declared it a “betrayal” of trust. He was commenting on the statement reportedly made at a meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance by Union Finance Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey, that…
New Education Policy: India’s great leap backward
In a document like the New Education Policy, one must distinguish platitudes from new provisions, including within the latter even the dropping of old platitudes. Thus phrases like “education is a public good”, “6 per cent of GDP should be…
Asia’s Covid-19 Response and the Road to a Green Recovery
Across the world, one consequence of the coronacrisis has been a shift away from fiscal conservatism, with diminishing concern for austerity or even fiscal prudence. Victor Gaspar and Gita Gopinath of the IMF estimate that the total value of the global…
Protecting the Regulatory and Legal Infrastructure for Food Sovereign, Food Self Reliant India (Atma Nirbhar Bharat)
Peasants have fed India over thousands of years through ecologically sophisticated agriculture which has inspired the global organic and agroecology movements of today . The British colonial rule destroyed our Food Sovereignty through a system of extraction taxes from the…
Income decline before the Pandemic
The pandemic and the lockdown are certainly causing an absolute shrinkage in the Gross Domestic Product of the Indian economy. But these tend to obscure something very serious that was happening even earlier, namely a real income decline for vast…
Modi’s Covid-19 Policies make clear that in India some lives matter more than others
In February, 12-year-old Jamlo Makdam left her home in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh to work as a farm labourer in the chilli fields of Telangana, earning 200 rupees (about £2) a day. But on the morning of 23 March,…