Nick Bloom: “It is becoming pretty clear that hybrid is here to stay. To give you three numbers which hold for the UK and the US pretty well: before the pandemic all-paid-days work from home was very rare, about 5 per cent of paid days. During the pandemic, it was roughly 50 per cent. Post-pandemic, it looks as if those employees are going to work, on average, two to three days a week in the office and two to three days a week at home, so you get to about 25 per cent of days. That is a fivefold increase. Pre-pandemic, working from home was doubling roughly every 12 to 13 years, so it is about 30 years of increase in work from home over the space of 18 months. This could be one of the biggest impacts from the pandemic in the long run.”
FT: “India’s buoyant economy disguises areas of vulnerability. Business community exudes optimism but profound social and economic inequalities persist…India remains a dual economy and a two-tier society, as Chakraborty puts it. Twenty per cent of Indians, or about 250m people, are doing just fine. They live in the formal economy, have secure incomes and jobs and aspire to buy electric vehicles. But the remainder inhabit the more precarious world of the informal economy, where job losses, declining income and reduced consumption in the wake of the pandemic are far more prevalent. “About 40 per cent of Indians can’t afford to even buy a packet of biscuits,” says Chakraborty — let alone a two-wheeled vehicle.””
NYTimes: “India, one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, is halfway through an ambitious drive to provide clean tap water by 2024 to all the roughly 192 million households across its 600,000 villages. About 18,000 government engineers are overseeing the $50 billion undertaking, which includes hundreds of thousands of contractors and laborers who are laying more than 2.5 million miles of pipe…The mission to deliver water to every household combines two of Mr. Modi’s political strengths: his grasp of the day-to-day problems of hundreds of millions of India’s poor and his penchant for ambitious solutions.”
