The “haphazard” nature of urban planning in India habitually becomes a topic of public debate whenever our cities encounter a major crisis, like the urban flooding that Chennai witnessed recently. Since urban planning and its enforcement are routinely declared the culprit of India’s “dysfunctional” cities, it is important to examine the roots underpinning India’s current urban planning regime.

As the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic resulted in a near-complete lockdown of the Indian economy, digital platforms were in turmoil amidst raging protests from their workers. Delivery service platforms such as Swiggy faced workers’ agitation against repeated paycuts and scaling down of their monthly incentives at a time when they were forced to deliver in containment zones, risking personal health and braving violence from the police forces on the ground.

The COVID-19 crisis brought the woes of Indian platform workers into sharp focus, as the lack of labor rights—regulated work hours, minimum wages, data rights, and social protection—exacerbated the precarity and insecurity of their work. As the lockdown was implemented in major cities, digital delivery platforms became all-purpose pick-and-drop services in response to surging demand.

This year witnessed a renewed reckoning about the rights and wrongs of partition. Both Palestine and Ireland—partition scenarios most commonly associated with India and Pakistan—have seen debates about the merits of the process of partition and its finality played out with a greater urgency over the past few months. For India, lessons offered from both these locations should be valuable, particularly in the current context of the attempt to politically weaponize Partition memories.

In the early Spring of 2021, as many nations in the global north were recovering from COVID-19, India witnessed the deadliest surge yet, resulting in over 20 million new cases and more than 250,000 deaths. For many Indians, the ferocity of this wave was unexpected.