In The Making of a Catastrophe, PERI researcher Jayati Ghosh describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst health calamity in India for at least a century and, in particular, how the central government’s “very specific policy failures—acts of both commission and omission—were responsible for the widespread and pronounced decline in people’s livelihoods …and caused major setbacks to the development project of the country.” Ghosh documents how the central government “did next to nothing to ensure basic protection for the hundreds of millions of people who were denied income for several months.”

Over 2020-21, farmer protests in India turned into a movement provoked by the passage of farm laws designed to dismantle regulation of agricultural trade, provide a legal framework for contract farming arrangements, and facilitate corporate entry into agricultural production and trade. C.P. Chandrasekhar explains that despite intense farmer opposition, the government held out for almost a year after the movement began before withdrawing the laws. Chandrasekhar describes the factors underlying this stand-off by tracing the post-Independence evolution of agricultural and food policy and examining the political economy context of the positions adopted by the farmers and the government.