Blogs

Access to electricity ensures increased economic productivity, healthcare services and better educational prospects and is thus crucial for socio-economic development. While grid expansion and advances in the distributed Renewable Energy (RE) industry have made significant efforts to reach unserved and under-served populations, several livelihoods, healthcare and educational facilities still lack this vital resource.

Caught in a vicious cycle of under-development, a potent tool for the rural and remote populations to break out of cyclical poverty is access to electricity. Low...

By investing in cycling infrastructure now, the city with one of the most severe traffic congestions in the world, can recover from the lockdown more sustainably and build more resilience.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Bengaluru could have been at par with other major Indian cities, but quick and decisive actions by the government have helped stem that risk. As the city crawls back to normalcy and people look at safer mobility options, Bengaluru now faces the...

This blog was originally published on WRI.

The axiom for this anxious moment is: coronavirus makes everything more complicated. That has been the case in Bangladesh and eastern India in the season’s first tropical cyclone, Amphan, where high winds and lashing rain threatened the region’s most vulnerable populations. Decades of preparation, plus a weakening of the storm as it made landfall, appear to have mitigated Amphan’s initial impact: the...

Even as global health experts raise concerns over the risks faced by rural areas during the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight the need for a comprehensive approach by governments to tackle it, a hospital for marginalized communities in remote Jharkhand is leading the way in crisis-preparedness. The Nav Jivan Hospital in Palamu district, a 100-bed medical facility, is today on the frontline of rural India’s fight against COVID-19.

Established in 1961 to serve two of the most under-...

Fighting COVID-19: A Solar-powered Hospital in Rural Jharkhand Takes on the Pandemic

A slightly modified version of this piece appeared on Times blog on May 11.

Social distancing, isolation and locking down of cities and oneself is the norm in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this, inequality in cities has been laid bare, exposing the startling vulnerability of the urban poor. The current economic slowdown is being...

The COVID-19 health crisis and associated lockdown has thrown into plain view the fragility of existing systems, from healthcare and governance, to the gig economy and global markets. With people confined to their homes and restricted mobility, cities are working to not only manage and contain the spread of the disease but also ensure a consistent, efficient and reliable supply of basic services. While the struggles of providing equal access to efficient and reliable basic services is not new to Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in India, limiting contagion and avoiding secondary health impacts...

India has been under a complete lockdown since March 24 to arrest the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Six weeks into this unprecedented lockdown, there have been 49,501 recorded cases of COVID-19 and 1,697 deaths (as of May 6). This crisis, apart from being a human tragedy, is also expected to hit the economy hard.

A closer look into the current scenario, however, reveals that we are facing three converging crises: the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate impact on the economy and the ever-present threat from climate change. What remains to be seen is how the pandemic and its...

The novel coronavirus has cut across class and cities, borders and barriers, and thrown many a government and their healthcare systems under the bus. It has also exposed the glaring disparity between the adaptive capacity of different sections of the population. Like most disasters the brunt of this one too, falls more severely on the poor. This is especially visible in India; with a sizeable chunk of its 1.3 billion — the...

As the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, rapidly spreads across the world, health services in many nations are increasingly overwhelmed, while the global economy is falling into an unprecedented recession. The World Bank has cut India’s growth forecast for 2020-21 to 2.8%, down from 5% in 2019-20. Informal sector workers and members of lower income groups have been hit particularly hard as their wages have disappeared. The International Labour Organization estimates that...