The Jobless Recovery Nobody Wants to Explain
Four years after COVID, India's labour market tells a story the headline numbers refuse to tell
The Development State That Showed Up
On Caravan's RSS Project, the political economy of parallel infrastructure, and why the fight against Hindutva is inseparable from the fight for a working welfare state
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The Gas Chamber We Call Home
On India's air pollution catastrophe: the year-round industrial poisoning we ignore, the farmers we scapegoat, and the billions we lose pretending it's someone else's problem
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The Jobless Recovery Nobody Wants to Explain
Four years after COVID, India's labour market tells a story the headline numbers refuse to tell
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Data Obfuscation as Modi Operandi
It was the middle of April 2021, the second wave of the pandemic had just about begun to rear its ugly head in India. I was looking forward to spending quiet time with my new-born and celebrating a decade of living with and loving my partner. Then everyone got CoVid (by everyone I mean everyone including my then 2 month old) and all hell broke loose. I remember the horror it became, the frantic search for medicines, the desperation for a hospital bed, leaving the city in disgust and then the three months of deaths, deaths and more deaths.
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The Costs of Poor Policy Design
This last week I've been ill and so has much of my family. I gave up on trying to meet work commitments. For a while did little other than clean up my watsapp messages, contacts and messages. One of the really random messages I received was from SBI which said something about logging into "web--banking" (sic) and taking a pledge to celebrate vigilance awareness week. I found the message interesting, because, like many other things, the role of vigilance as an idea, is predicated on the idea that corruption per se is an evil that needs to go.
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Safety Nets, As If People Matter
India’s GDP growth rate, even prior to the pandemic, was a five-point- someone. It really needs to grow. In order to grow, as we’ve discussed, we need less scared and more aspirational folks. People who demand are the ones who can stimulate industry to grow and invest. People need to find reasons to believe in the better.
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Meet Mr. Stagflation
Last week we agreed that India has an unemployment problem. This, we said, is because the economy has had structural issues. Afterall - all countries do. We seemed to be trotting along at a reasonable rate until recently - the illusion of growth and better incomes seems to have been at least partly true. Then things went downhill at a rapid pace.
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The Hats Our Kids Should Never Wear
Have you watched television lately? I recently switched back to the Basic Service Tier (BST) service after what seemed like an endless love-affair with Netflix, Amazon Prime, MXPlayer and more.... What seemed like an ad-free, choice-led experience on a streaming platform quickly morphed into multiple monthly payments for multiple services, each with juicy binge-worthy stories and an endless collection of accurate recommendations that I just couldn't wiggle out of. I was becoming a slave.
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The Unemployment Problem Nobody Wants To Talk About
Most of us can now feel that India is in a mess. Our jobs are going, our incomes are sinking and things feel a lot worse than they have been in the last decade. This feeling is called unemployment - or more specifically "stagflation", a deathly combination of stagnation (read no growth) and inflation where everything from footwear to beer to basic medicine is rapidly getting more and more expensive.
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