India, May 23 -- The current pandemic is an unprecedented calamity and its economic and social pain is immense. The worst affected are the populations who subsist on daily wage or seasonal income. Barring agriculture, which is still functional, the rural economy is groaning in distress. Since the deeper behavioural changes and social restrictions that the pandemic has imposed are expected to become - and remain - the new normal for a long time, we will have to recalibrate our economic and social patterns so that the hardship of daily subsistence does not further compound problems created by the looming health crisis.

Almost 90 per cent of the workers in India are part of the informal economy and thrive on daily work, with little provisio...