India has endured too much in the past three years: the Covid-19 pandemic has killed 2.2 million to 9.7 million people, the lockdown has shrunk the economy by a quarter and sparked the biggest outbreak since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Internal migration, urban workers have fled back to their rural hometowns. But at the same time, a new force has come together and will transform the Indian economy over the next decade, improve the lives of 1.4 billion people, and change the balance of power in Asia. Homegrown tech is key: India just launched a national ‘tech stack’: a suite of state-funded digital services that can link every Indian to electronic identity, payment and tax systems, and bank accounts that will boost India’s cash The economy entered the 21st century. In addition, India’s IT talent is abundant, its attractiveness for manufacturing is increasing, and the number of solar installations is ranked third in the world. The changes won’t bring about a manufacturing boom as big as South Korea or China, but will help India become the world’s fastest-growing large economy by 2022. One of the risks to the Indian economy is that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been hostile to Muslims and has been using this hostility to unite its own political base, which can lead to violence, conflict and human rights issues that hinder India’s access to Western markets.
Frank Pega is an officer in the World Health Organization’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health, where he led a study commissioned by WHO and the International Labour Organization. The study describes the current economic crisis and the situation before the pandemic: 745,000 people die each year from working too long. “We found that the deadliest risk factor in the workplace is not machinery, not particulate matter, but working too long,” Pega explained. A Harvard study found that in countries under lockdown due to Covid-19, Working hours increased by an average of 10%. Data from Germany is no exception: 1.7 billion people worked overtime in 2020, and more than half were not paid; the number of absentee days due to mental stress in 2020 was twice as high as a decade ago. As a result, more jobs are allocated to those who are still employed. These problems have existed before, and the new crown has made them worse. The most recent attempt to master overwork came from the United States. In early April, 38 U.S. and Canadian companies introduced a four-day workweek with full pay. The researchers hoped to achieve similar positive results to previous Icelandic studies, when nearly 3,000 people reduced their working hours from 40 hours to 36 or 35 hours in two programs in 2015 and 2017, with the same pay. Productivity and efficiency remained the same or even improved in most tests, according to Iceland’s assessment. Employee accountability and satisfaction have also improved. Fewer hours of work do not mean worse quality of work, but an increasingly higher quality of life. This will be new territory for many companies, provided they learn from their mistakes.
The decision in Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to abortion nearly half a century ago, is about to be overturned as conservatives now make up six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, according to a draft decision that has recently leaked from the U.S. Supreme Court. In the future, whether abortion is legal or not will be largely left to the states, and nearly half of the U.S. states run by Republicans will make abortion illegal in those states. On a practical level, nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties lack abortion clinics, so abortion often means traveling long distances, which also means spending money on transportation, lodging, and child care, not to mention the financial cost of taking time off. In some states, people arrive at the clinic knowing that the law requires them to come twice, first for a consultation and second for surgery, with a mandatory waiting period of up to three days in between. The cost of a miscarriage, which is not eligible for official funding, can range from about $500 in the first trimester to more than $1,000 in a longer pregnancy. All of the above makes abortion almost impossible for low-income people. In the future, drugs may be the best backup plan for the post-Roy era. Pills to terminate pregnancy, also known as medical abortions, now account for more than half of all abortions in the United States, but only 1 in 5 American adults are aware of the existence of this option. .
