Even a beginning student of rural India with only a passing familiarity with its complex social organization can wax eloquent about one stylized fact—the near-perfect segregation of residential space by caste and religion. Introductory textbooks have immortalized spatial segregation as a constitutive feature of social life in agrarian India.

In less than half a decade, the Indian economy has suffered three major shocks in quick succession – demonetization of high denomination currency notes (2016), mismanaged transition to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime (2017) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020). On each of these occasions, the unavailability of reliable and timely data tied the hands of policymakers and exposed critical gaps in official information systems.

India’s large population of internal migrants experienced punishing hardships during the COVID-19 lockdown, as many struggled to return home and access essential services. The country’s rapid urbanization has involved the mass relocation of job aspirants from the countryside to cities. Few doubt the significance of this demographic shift for India’s economic growth. Yet the early days of the pandemic brought into focus the short shrift too often paid to movers.

At the beginning of this year, India went into the throes of protests, with students and women at the forefront. The protests marked a new dawn of creative politics with the potential for stemming the tide of democratic decline—a moment to celebrate the vibrancy of civil society in India, unprecedented in its recent past. Unfortunately, the incipient ferment ebbed away in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown in March.  

On May 20, 2020, in what is becoming a semi-annual environmental ritual, a super-cyclone pummeled through the Bengal delta, breaching embankments in the Sundarbans and submerging large swathes of Kolkata. The winds and the tides that accompany these super-cyclones have a curious way of foregrounding how deeply the concrete city is embedded in the deltaic ecology and the region’s hydrology.

In June 2020, India was elected a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council (UNSC). This comes at a crucial time for the current multilateral order, which to many observers has entered a state of crisis. Climate change and COVID-19 are only the most glaring reminder of the urgent need for global cooperation. Yet, never has the post-war global order been so besieged by unilateral and nationalist tendencies.