ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Search

Advanced Search

PandemicSubscribe to Pandemic

Wholesale and Retail Food Prices in Maharashtra during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Vol. 56, Issue No. 40, 02 Oct, 2021
Nidhi Kaicker, Raghav Gaiha, Radhika Aggarwal

The analysis builds on the extant literature in three ways: it covers the longest period of the lockdown; offers robust comparisons of means and variances of food commodities’ prices and the price wedge between them in different cities/market centres in Maharashtra during the lockdown relative to the pre-pandemic period; and finally gives a distillation of time-series analysis of co-movements of wholesale and retail prices between pairs of centre/wholesale and retail prices, mutual dependence of wholesale and retail prices, taking their lags into account, and their time-varying volatility.

Ways to Tackle Hunger during COVID-19

Vol. 56, Issue No. 40, 02 Oct, 2021
Anjali Taneja

COVID-19 has not only caused deaths but has also exacerbated hunger and starvation due to nationwide lockdowns in the country that have led to a massive breakdown in the supply chain networks. These tough times are no less than a “wake-up call” for India to devise a permanent supply chain solution that ensures an uninterrupted supply of food and nutrition as well as timely healthcare and employment for its population.

 

Serving Quarantine

Vol. 56, Issue No. 39, 25 Sep, 2021
Chandramohan S

(After Serving Time by Charles Simic)

 

National Lockdown and COVID-19 Containment in India

Vol. 56, Issue No. 39, 25 Sep, 2021
Zakir Husain, Arup Kumar Das, Saswata Ghosh

What impact the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown has had on the spread of the virus in Class 1 cities of India is discussed using an interrupted time series model. Four variants of the susceptible–infected–recovered models are used to develop a counterfactual, which are compared with actual data. The analysis reveals that the lockdown has reduced the number of COVID-19 cases by 23.65 million–33.77 million and averted approximately 0.001 million–0.010 million deaths. At the regional level, it has prevented a major health crisis as existing intensive care unit and ventilator facilities for critically ill patients would have been inadequate.

 

COVID-19 Lockdown and Human Development

Vol. 56, Issue No. 38, 18 Sep, 2021
Chandrika Singh, Shoumeli Das, Anuradha Nair

Maharashtra has emerged as the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the trade-off between lockdowns to flatten the infection curve and saving an already slow economy, there is a significant human cost, thus exposing and deepening the existing structural inequalities. The article maps and analyses the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown based on the three dimensions of human development—health and nutrition, education, and livelihood. Given the acute shortage of food supplies for certain groups during the period, the article examines the government response by analysing the implementation of food programmes.  

 

District-level Estimates of Unemployment Rates in Odisha

Vol. 56, Issue No. 38, 18 Sep, 2021
Khan M F, Hukum Chandra, B N Mohanty, Sridhar Sahoo

This article describes the possibilities of using an alternative method, such as small area estimation, for generating district-level unemployment estimates with higher precision. The SAE method is applied to generate the unemployment rate of different districts of Odisha combining the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2018–19 data of the National Sample Survey Office and the auxiliary variables from other secondary data sources.

 

Using Public Procurement Strategically

Vol. 56, Issue No. 38, 18 Sep, 2021
Yugank Goyal

The article examines policy decisions and practices in public procurement in India during the pandemic, and finds that bureaucracy could not use public procurement strategically and relied upon archaic and centralised management of procurement to (mis)handle the pandemic. The article also offers some lessons from China’s procurement designs and calls for a major reform in this sector in India.

 

Engineering Flexibility without Accountability

Vol. 56, Issue No. 38, 18 Sep, 2021

Changing chief ministers reflects a deep damage to substantive accountability in a democracy.

 

Lessons from Sri Lanka

Vol. 56, Issue No. 37, 11 Sep, 2021

Ethnocracy and concentration of power can derail even an affluent nation.

 

Not ‘Sailing in the Same Boat’: Why the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Been Worse for LGBTQI+ Persons in India

While the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives across the world, there can be no argument that the worst-affected are individuals and communities that were already vulnerable before the pandemic. The pandemic has exacerbated and made visible existing structural inequities. Like other crises, the pandemic is not neutral to gender, caste, ethnicity, class, sexuality or any other determinant of one’s social location. It is more than clear now that people already marginalised and stigmatised, are the worst hit by the pandemic lockdowns. The hit is marked on several axes —psychological, economic...

Covid-19 Pandemic: Shortages, Hesitancy and Pricing Plague India’s Covid-19 Vaccination Programme

India’s COVID-19 vaccination roll-out has been marred by challenges of shortages and hesitancy. With the new open market policy of vaccine procurement and possible entry of foreign-made vaccines, government responsibility and transparency are the need of the hour.

Who Does a Cyclone Actually Affect? Analysing the Impacts of Major Cyclones in India

While “natural disasters” such as cyclones cause widespread and indiscriminate devastation, their impact is much worse for vulnerable communities. Such groups face the brunt of not only the cyclone but also of inefficient government planning, caste discrimination, health problems and apathy.

Pages

Back to Top

EPW

Term & Policy

Circulation

Advertisement

Connect with us