While the Covid-19-induced lockdown has yielded mixed and spatially diverse results so far in terms of disease containment, the socio-economic impact has been uniformly devastating across states in India. This warrants a careful appraisal of the lockdown strategy and a…
There is an exodus of finance from the third world at present, far exceeding in scale what had occurred in 2008 after the financial crisis. Even more important than the actual outflow is the desire on the part of finance…
The distress to which lakhs of migrant workers were suddenly exposed by the Narendra Modi government’s decision to announce a three-week-long lockdown at four hours’ notice with zero planning, has also highlighted a crucial aspect of the Indian economy. This…
The current pandemic has brought to the fore, and with exceptional clarity, the fundamental contradiction underlying contemporary globalization, namely, the contradiction between the interests of finance and those of the people. Indeed this contradiction, which characterizes the era of globalization…
The tragic irony could not have been more complete. The country is under lockdown, but thousands of migrant workers are thronging bus stands or marching on the roads, making a mockery of it; the aim of the lockdown is to…
The defining images of the coronavirus crisis in India are the images of migrants, children in tow, walking hundreds of kilometers to return home - only to be denied entrance. These images are driving home the extent of the government’s…
It is said that in a crisis everybody becomes a socialist; free markets take a back seat, to the benefit of the working people. During the second world war for instance, when universal rationing was introduced in Britain, the average…
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 cooperation between the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC oil exporters, including oil-major Russia, to limit production and supply of oil and help hold oil prices has collapsed. In a dramatic post-Coronavirus-pandemic turn, discussions to extend…
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…
