THE pandemic and its consequences manifested in different parts of the world and more importantly its differential impact on classes of people and segments of population reveals deeper chasms and structural divides that capitalism reproduces in its process of accumulation.In the twentieth century since ‘Spanish Flu’ in 1918 we faced two more pandemics namely, the Asian Flu in 1957 and Hong Kong Flu in 1968.

THE government of India proposes to recycle publicly owned brownfield capital assets mostly underutilised or with low returns into revenue generating assets controlled by private corporates with a view to fund National Infrastructure Plan (NIP) involving Rs 111 lakh crores stretched over a period of five years. In this connection National Asset Monetisation Pipeline (NAMP) has been announced which sets a target of mobilising roughly Rs 6 lakh crores which however amounts to 14 per cent of Rs 43 lakh crores suggested to be the proposed outlay of central government in the NIP.