I write this from Bengaluru, during the lockdown imposed by the Modi government to tackle the covid-19 pandemic. The lockdown has triggered two contrasting streams on social media. On the one hand, images of a cleaner Yamuna River, of the Himalayas newly visible from the hitherto polluted industrial towns in Punjab, and even of Mount Everest, which can now be seen from villages on the Gangetic plain, elicit comments like ‘Mother Earth is healing’ and ‘How can we retain the green dividend of covid-19?’ On the other, the footage of hundreds of thousands of now-jobless migrant workers, confined in transit camps or desperately setting out to walk hundreds of miles to their villages, reveals the seamy underbelly of capitalist economic growth and the discrimination that runs deep in our society. In this context, with economies shattered and a global depression looming, the ongoing ‘green strategy’ debate in NLR may seem irrelevant. But I will argue that it is only if we engage in this debate, while using a broader, integrated socio-environmental perspective, that we can understand why ‘Mother Earth’ cannot heal herself as things stand, and why retaining the ‘green dividend’ of covid-19 is intertwined with the fate of workers.