Ashwini Deshpande discusses the effects of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on the gender gaps in paid and unpaid work.

The Financial Express quotes a CEDA data narrative on why MGNREGA might still be falling short.

Quartz India republishes the CEDA data narrative on the possibility of India facing a third wave of Covid-19.

The panelists from Ashoka University cover many diverse issues facing the country and possible remedies as it goes forward after the Second Wave of COVID-19.

BBC News quotes a CEDA Picture This entry as it reports on the hesitancy of women to take vaccines in rural Bihar.

Ashwini Deshpande writes: Mass vaccination can succeed only when we take into account structural inequalities, recognise the specific challenges these impose, and find solutions to circumvent them.

Indian households reallocated their expenditures due to the impact of COVID-19, writes Firstpost as it quotes the CEDA-CMIE Bulletin.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns hurt already declining household and individual wage incomes, writes Quartz India as it quotes the CEDA-CMIE Bulletin.

We see in it that gross fixed capital formation at constant prices actually increased in Quarter 2, indeed by a whopping 60 percent...Three other sources of expenditure exist, namely, exports, private final consumption expenditure and government final consumption expenditure. The first two show a substantial increase over their Quarter 1 levels but government final consumption expenditure actually declines by 25 percent over the same period. Could it be that the contraction in GDP would have been less but for this cut in government expenditure?

While there is a strong relationship between the death rate and public health expenditure, there is much less between the death rate and medical infrastructure in the public sector, be it hospitals or hospital beds per person. The clue to this most likely lies in the observation made by the well-known surgeon, Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty that: “it is doctors who treat patients, not hospital beds” (NDTV, October 2, 2020).

The experience of the pandemic teaches us that a normalisation of ‘working from home’ supposedly allows women to participate in paid work and simultaneously take care of domestic responsibilities. However, without changes that ensure more equality in domestic work as well as in paid work opportunities and more importantly changes in social norms about women’s work, we are unlikely to see a significant change in women’s participation in the labour force.

The experience of the pandemic teaches us that a normalisation of WFH — without concomitant changes that reduce the burden of domestic chores and care work, and an increase in paid work opportunities — is unlikely to raise women’s participation in the labour force. As the pandemic forces our economy to hit the “reset” button, paying attention to job creation with a gender equity lens is essential for India to realise its tremendous gender dividend.

In the recent reconstitution of the Monetary Policy Committee, which conducts monetary policy in India, we can find a refreshing shift away from dogma. Not all its members may be macro-economists in the conventional sense but their work conveys that they will not be governed by rigid adherence to the model of inflation underlying RBI’s inflation targeting policy.

The lockdown was justified on the grounds that lives are more important than livelihoods. But, life having to be lived without a livelihood is not acceptable five months after the lockdown was first imposed.

Since the upper castes have more access to education and thereby have more secure jobs, they are less vulnerable to economic shocks such as the one produced by the lockdown. Therefore, we see that pre-existing faultlines, structural inequalities based on caste identity, reveal themselves yet again in the immediate post-lockdown job losses.

Rural-led growth relying on domestic demand is not likely to generate such high rates of growth. However, slower growth that directly benefits the bottom tier of population and generates its own momentum for a long enough time to transform the whole economy is preferable to a rapid burst that benefits only a few and exhausts itself in a short time.

Now that work from home has become normalised for everybody, hopefully, the stigma that was attached earlier to working from home, which was transferred to women workers, will be eliminated. If that was the reason for employers to either not hire women or to hire them in lower proportions, hopefully, that would change.

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz suggested a partial alternative to the patent system that would both incentivise research but avoid monopoly pricing. This involved a government creating a “Prize Fund”. The Fund would then award prizes to those companies that successfully develop preventions or treatments of diseases affecting large numbers of people.

The media has recently reported some economists responding to the suggestion of money financing with the Friedmanesque quip “there ain’t no free lunch”. But it may be mentioned that there is no free lunch in the case of debtfinancing either. Not only have the moneys to be repaid, they will have to be paid back in hard currency.

I do not see the economic package unvelied by the PM contributing significantly even to a revival of the economy leave alone leading to self-reliance which is what ‘Atmanirbhar’ means.

It is also worth noting that the data confirms that, even with men helping out more around the house in April 2020, domestic chores are still overwhelmingly performed by women. In this sense, India is not an exception to the global pattern. It also remains to be seen if this trend persists after April 2020.

So, States of India harbouring greater wealth than most have registered a higher mortality rate from COVID-19 even as some with far less have succeeded in containing them…Clearly wealth is not always health; when an epidemic strikes public capital in the form of a strong health infrastructure is.

We find that autocracies are much more preemptive in their policy response. However, right after the first case is registered, democracies are very quick in ramping up their testing policy, contact-tracing policy and public campaigning. In fact, they surpass the autocracies.

The response of the Government of India to the likely COVID-induced recession is incommensurate. Assuming production is spread evenly across the year, the two month lockdown may be estimated to have wiped out the equivalent of a sixth of the GDP for 2019-20, which was Rs. 203,84,759 crores.

On one hand, you see a dop in their [women's] employment. On the other hand, you see that when you think of a stigmatized job that dalits do or these very risky frontline health jobs, they seem to be exclusively reserved for women.

The economic package announced by the finance minister in mid-May was not a stimulus, as it does not inject demand into the economy. Greater public spending alone can do that at the present juncture. But, for some reason the government has shied away from undertaking it.

I do hope that increased possibilities of employment for women will go hand in hand with changes in the gender workload sharing norms inside the house. Which can happen by the way, because with the World Wars, there is evidence in Europe that gender norms for sharing work in a house did change.

On average, in India, employment in April 2020 was about 67% of employment in the previous year...Women relative to their employment level pre-lockdown lost more jobs relative to men and within women it was driven by rural women.

The government should offer to make direct investments in businesses by taking a 'minority stake', which will be recovered through higher taxes on profits over a number of years. By making payments conditional on profitability, rather than saddling firms with repayable debt, equity finance will be more sustainable in the long term.

In a striking demonstration of what can go wrong if we do not keep our own counsel, today India finds herself saddled with an economic model of unbounded growth that destroys natural capital and a political model based on the vision of a majoritarian nation-state that promises endless social turmoil. It is not clear that a course correction will emerge from India’s political parties competing for power. Only a collective effort can achieve it.

When women have less decision-making power than men, either in households or government, their needs are less likely to be met. The shadow pandemic is as real in India as anywhere else...Being gender-blind doesn't mean that the policy is gender-neutral.

It has been estimated that in 2019, the imputed value of this unpaid reproductive work by women was equivalent of $10.9 trillion, which is more than the earnings of the top 50 firms in the world in 2018 (Wezerek and Ghodsee 2020). The monetary imputation is useful to understand the sheer magnitude of unpaid work.

Overall, we have found that supply chains in India disrupted in the aftermath of the first lockdown have since recovered somewhat. However, they continue to be disrupted in the case of perishables.

The conclusion is that the government is keen on signalling fiscal prudence by sticking as far as possible to the deficit in the budget announced. We can now see that behind the finance ministry’s announcement last week that it is raising the public borrowing limit for the financial year is the reality that the government’s revenues are set to fall behind its expenditure, and not any preparation for the stimulus to come.

I see a huge scope for this data and we need to find out ways to be able to make use of it for making intelligent policy decisions and see where the economy is going. Because that data is available to us everyday, be it data from job portal, banking or retail.

Overall, the representation of women in decision-making bodies is not that high at all...What that does is that it makes the gendered impacts invisible. To maintain or improve gender equality, policies will have to be gender-targeted in terms of their impacts.

Women do between six to nine times more hours of domestic work than men...Ignoring gender will slow down the fight against COVID-19. Flattening the pandemic curve should not be at the expense of shadow pandemic curve rising exponentially.

In the fight against COVID-19, many other essential diseases and outbreaks are getting ignored. Now we're getting reports about Dengue, Malaria and Chikungunyaa, which are also killer diseases...There's a whole range of public health emergencies even if you didn't count the economic costs of the lockdown.

For the moment, the government should seriously consider the money financing route as funding the deficit will raise interest rates. An objection encountered is that the former is inevitably inflationary. Actually, it is not more so than monetary easing implemented by the central bank.

What the pandemic is revealing is just how important migrants are to production and service provision in the Indian economy. I don't think the magnitude of the migrant's contribution to the economy was ever as clear as it is now. It's really a very big segment of the workforce, on the backs of which industries and services run in this country.

The recovery programme proposed has two components – to provide a comprehensive safety net for vulnerable sections and to jumpstart the economy. This is ambitious and requires a sizeable outlay, notably 10% of GDP as proposed in the report. But, in view of the magnitude of the crisis, we agree that the cost is worth it and fiscal sustainability should not be a concern right now.

While Kerala’s human development achievements are indeed noteworthy and could serve as a model of sorts for much of the rest of the country, the heavy shortfall in its production of the items of everyday consumption takes away from its overall economic performance.

Not amending the Act is one of the sources of the paralysis in economic policy today. It ensures that the government cannot expand its spending to battle the consequences of the spread of the coronavirus. Greater expenditure is required in four buckets, first for relief, next for the medical response, then for an aggregate demand stimulus and, finally, for ramping up the public health infrastructure.

Many MSMEs were struggling even before the pandemic reached India. GDP growth is the lowest in a decade, and MSMEs carry debt of Rs 69 lakh crore, 84% of which is self-financed or raised from expensive informal sources. Adding to this debt during a crisis would prove burdensome.

Looking at the pandemic and its responses through the gender lens is needed, if not for anything else then just to contain the pandemic...If we want to understand the gendered nature of the COVID and the pandemic, we need to collect gender disaggregated data.

Restrictions that are being imposed by the State, even if they are presumed to be necessary in the present circumstances, have deprived the right of people to their livelihoods, and therefore their Right to Life. Such restrictions would become unreasonable, arbitrary and unconscionable, if immediate steps are not taken to compensate the people worst affected by these restrictions so as to enable them to afford the basic necessities of life.

Then pandemic will abate one day, but if it leaves behind a large population that is unhealthy because of being deprived of minimum subsistence, it will adversely impact India’s growth potential for several years to come.

The chart shows that there is already a sharp jump in complaints related to domestic violence and the “right to live with dignity”, and a smaller increase in rape/attempt to rape and sexual assault. The last two charges are telling, as this number covers two weeks of complete lockdown (therefore no movement outside the home), and reduced mobility in March due to fear of infection. Thus, these rapes and assaults include those perpetrated by family members.

Women who are working, for them it's not just about doing well at their jobs. But it's about doing well at the jobs, crossing the hurdle race which involves cooking, cleaning, ironing and washing clothes repeatedly.

Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated “Jaan bhi aur jahan bhi”, implying that the economy cannot be ignored even as we are engaged in saving lives, the government is yet to announce a stimulus beyond a meagre relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore.

Given the lockdown, what is not negotiable is extensive and generous government spending to compensate for the known costs of the lockdown at the individual and the household level...As long as you're able to afford making those kinds of social transfers, you can go ahead and decide that this is the lockdown that you need to institute.

While relief is of the essence in the short term, the far greater task is that of a reconstruction that must follow. Reconstruction would entail both energising an economy that would have slowed during the lockdown, but also building one that would contain the goods needed to make life in India more secure in the future.

The latest projections of GDP growth for the Indian economy in FY21 range from –0.5 per cent (Nomura) to 2.5 per cent (Moody’s). The Economic Intelligence Unit projects a quarter-on quarter growth of –9.3 per cent in Q2, 2020. If the social distancing measures remain in place for a relatively extended period and it takes time for business and consumer confidence to return and normal business operations to resume, then GDP growth in FY21 might well be toward the lower end of the range.

The most horrific and obvious impact of the lockdown imposed to flatten the curve has been a rise in domestic and intimate partner violence (IPV) as has been noted for the US, the UK, and China, among other countries. A rise in domestic violence (DV) literally increases the risk to women’s lives: as one curve gets flattened, the other one slopes upwards, perhaps not exponentially, but sharply, nevertheless.

But in this virtual non-existent classroom, there was nobody but me. And I was talking to my inanimate, unresponsive, expressionless iPad. I went through the lecture, occasionally repeating, occasionally pausing and completely clueless about whether I had managed to make a connection.

As India battles an unforgiving second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, this CEDA Policy Brief from April 2020 can still help policy makers tackle its effects on people’s lives and the economy

With nationwide lockdown and high unpredictability during COVID-19, this policy brief recommends a forward-looking relief package. The authors suggest disbursement of both cash and in-kind transfers to all households holding a ration card while strengthening the PDS system and supply chain simultaneously. In the second part of the brief, the authors recommend targeted policy measures for the few salient population groups. Special attention is drawn to some of the pressing issues, such as malnutrition amongst children, increased fertility rates, domestic and intimate partner violence, needs of temporary/seasonal migrant workers amongst other most vulnerable population groups.