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.

It is useful to recall the belief that Kerala was named for its geography…In the 1990s, as mobile telephony was spreading, someone had triumphantly coined the slogan “Geography is history”. We now see that at least some of our history will be shaped by geography.

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.