Articles by Alok Prasanna

Alok Prasanna Kumar is a co-founder and senior resident fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy in Bengaluru. He works on areas of urban governance and judicial reforms, and writes a monthly column for Economic and Political Weekly and Deccan Herald.

There is a specific pattern to the spread of COVID-19, one that’s tied to the way in which global supply chains have been built over the last few decades and where people live and work. If the 1918 “Spanish Influenza” epidemic in the past was spread by soldiers returning home from World War 1, urbanisation and globalisation have had a huge say in how COVID-19 has spread across the world. It is also for this reason that it has proved hard to tackle – global supply chains, industries and cities (where more than half of humanity lives) cannot simply be…

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