Pandemic

With rising non-financial corporate debt and evidence of elevated borrowing levels among non-bank financial companies, the fragility resulting from excess leverage has returned to haunt developed country financial markets.

The union government’s flagship programme—the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana—launched in 2016 and revamped in 2020 for providing crop insurance to farmers—needs fundamental and structural changes for its effective implementation. The need of the hour is a more forceful and impactful state involvement in the scheme.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a catena of contractual disputes. The paper synthesises the Indian Contract Act and relevant case laws to present a legal position on force majeure, frustration of contract and contractual gaps, in the context of COVID-19. Using the economic analysis of law, it examines contractual disputes from various sectors, including power, construction and real estate, rental, event management and hospitality, and analyses these disputes from legal- and economic-efficiency points of view. Where contracts are not a good instrument for achieving equitable distribution of economic gains and losses, public policy is better suited to address equity and other related issues arising from long-term contracts.

The article looks at on-ground shifts in patterns of how the state and general public are treating sanitation workers, during the CoVID-19 pandemic. Based on interviews with sanitation workers in Hyderabad and Lucknow, three trajectories are identified in municipal and societal reactions to COVID-19. A variability is seen in how state and society respond in the face of renewed caste-based stigma underscored by inaction on the part of the state to concretely recognise sanitation workers’ rights.

The imposition of lockdown and COVID-19 has disturbed the life of tribals and forest dwellers by destroying their livelihood and health. The article argues that there is an urgent need to focus on food security and strong social protection mechanisms to help tribal communities to minimise the impact of the pandemic on their social and economic life.