India Can’t Be Self-Reliant & Prosperous With Price Caps, Quotas

A lot of people around the world will retweet you if you blame the coronavirus pandemic on ‘neoliberal capitalism’. In an excellent article in Boston Review, Alyssa Battistoni outlines the case. “(The) pandemic,” she argues “can hardly be understood as exogenous to capitalism: the virus itself is the outgrowth of the peri-urbanisation that has accompanied rapid development, the commodification of once-wild subsistence foods, new encounters between humans and nonhumans driven by industrial food production, and the global movement of both people and commodities.”Read more

Flashpoints on the Periphery: Understanding China’s Neighborhood Opportunism

How is China taking advantage of the pandemic to pursue its foreign policy goals?

Tensions in China’s periphery have increased dramatically over the past few months as Beijing stepped up the use of military and diplomatic tools within its neighborhood. The frequency of the events involving Chinese actors, especially in the second half of March, increased as normalcy started returning to the mainland after the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak.This raises a few questions. First, is this evidence of China’s opportunism at a time when the United States is struggling to maintain its presence in the East and Southeast Asian regions? Second, has Beijing adopted a more aggressive approach for the post-pandemic period? Third, would the recent spike in activities impact the regional order?Read more

This article was originally published in The Diplomat.

Is the government doing enough to fight Corona on health & economic fronts?

The events of the past few weeks have served as a grave reminder of the challenges of living in a globalised world. The benefits of globalisation and its impact on human progress can never be understated. However, every once in a while, through global financial crises or through pandemics such as the one we are currently witnessing with COVID-19, we are also reminded of its perils. What started in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 has within a few months, impacted over 267,000 people in 185 countries, unfortunately killing more than 11,000 people as of 22nd March 2020 already.The economic and social impact of this pandemic will only unfold over time but the early signs are not comforting. An estimated 25 million jobs are likely to be lost due to the COVID-19 crisis, pushing millions more into underemployment and working poverty. With supply chain disruptions impacting almost every sector including Information Technology, Manufacturing, Entertainment, Travel, and Retail, stock markets across the world have witnessed their worst performances since the 2008 global financial crisis. Global income is expected to shirk by as much as US $ 2 trillion in 2020, with developing economies alone bearing as much as US $ 220 billion of the impact. The resulting economic shock and looming financial crisis is expected to push the global annual growth below 2.5% in 2020.The full article is published in and available on The Quint

If India has to control coronavirus pandemic, it must contain 4 other contagions as well

The infodemic and the behavioural contagion feed off each other, and higher levels of social anxiety exacerbate the process. Similarly, the psychological and economic contagions reinforce each other and are in turn amplified by informational, behavioural and viral contagions. The complex interactions among five contagions make it much harder to contain the spread of the coronavirus that triggered this cascade. This why a governmental response focused on public health alone (with some information management thrown in) will not suffice.Just like there are war cabinets during wartime, the multiple pandemics call for a pandemic cabinet. If there ever was a time for the cliched whole of government approach, it is now.Read more