{"id":1497,"date":"2020-05-24T20:36:27","date_gmt":"2020-05-24T20:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.test\/india-and-covid-19-crisis-radical-measures-needed\/"},"modified":"2023-04-19T10:18:46","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T10:18:46","slug":"india-and-covid-19-crisis-radical-measures-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globaldev.blog\/india-and-covid-19-crisis-radical-measures-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"India and the Covid-19 crisis: radical measures needed"},"content":{"rendered":"
India faces an unprecedented emergency as a result of the pandemic and lockdown. This column calls for radical measures to resurrect the economy over the short, medium and long run. The government must undertake a massive institutional effort and inject an enormous amount of money to reinvigorate the economy from the bottom.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n India, the world\u2019s largest democracy, is locked down \u2013 forcefully \u2013 caught now between the Scylla of the pandemic and the Charybdis of economic catastrophe. While the specter of Covid-19 is haunting the whole world, the darkness of lockdown has descended upon India\u2019s phenomenally large and disadvantaged population engaged in petty farming and a myriad of other non-farm informal activities.<\/p>\n In these circumstances, India must think big to sustain life during this unprecedented emergency and to resurrect the economy in a post-Covid-19 world. The massive scale and deeply unequal nature of the impending economic disaster should compel us to veer away from the popular policy discourses relying on capitalist growth based on an impersonal, autonomous market<\/a> system, and especially on more intensive use of labor<\/a>, for post-lockdown economic recovery.<\/p>\n Such strategies may be both grossly inadequate and deeply exclusionary. They may even be intensely exploitative and unethical for the vast majority of the informally engaged and disadvantaged workforce.<\/p>\n Facts<\/strong><\/p>\n Let us have a look at the enormity and deep deprivation of India\u2019s informal sector and the petty farmhands and farmers.<\/p>\n Table 1, which presents shares of the sectoral workforce, shows that the non-farm informal sector (even excluding the vast informal construction sector), and especially agriculture, is mind-bogglingly large.<\/p>\n Table 2 presents partial labor productivity, a proxy for average labor income. The productivity levels of formal manufacturing and services are very high compared to those of agriculture and informality, and these absolute differences have been widening over time, leading to deepening deprivation.<\/p>\n Table 1. Percentage shares of sectoral workforce in India<\/p>\n