India has reported more than 300,000 daily COVID-19 cases for three consecutive weeks. “People are dying due to lack of oxygen, and the cost of cremation has gone up so much that families are dumping bodies in the rivers,” explains journalist Satya Sivaraman.

Today, he and professor Sirisha Naidu join us to talk about the underlying conditions that helped set the stage for the current health and economic crises in India—and how the pandemic there, as elsewhere, has “laid bare all of the neglect and all of the inequalities that exist in India.”

Satya Sivaraman is a journalist with over three decades of experience in newspapers and TV channels in South and South East Asia. Currently, he is the Communications Coordinator for ReAct’s Empowerment, Engagement and Network Extension (EEE).

Dr. Sirisha Naidu is an associate professor in economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Cover photo by Firos nv on Unsplash